Anthony Lewis: Are You Missing out on These Facebook Business Page Tips?

With 1.09 billion people logging in daily, Facebook is a huge resource for your business. The marketing potential is high, but how do you maximize it? Facebook Business Pages need to be treated differently from your personal profiles. There's plenty of competition for attention on Facebook, but that means a lot of opportunity for inspiration too.

Here are some Facebook Business Page tips to up your marketing game.

Define Your Facebook Goals

How you go about running your Facebook Business page is going to depend on your goals. It is a good idea to choose a main goal and then a couple following goals. Do you want to boost sales, engage with current customers, bring in new customers or all of the above? What is your top priority? If you are serious about your business, it's a good idea to decide what you want to get out of your page.

You could even add your main goal to your header. One of Peg Fitzpatrick's goals is easily recognized by her Facebook Header, which says “Check Out My Latest Video.”

At the same time, some businesses or organizations are completely clear on their goal. For example, what does the American Red Cross want you to do? Donate blood or platelets.

Make Your 'About' Section Count

The “About” tab on your Facebook for Business page is prime real estate and an opportunity for you to show off your business. What should you include in your About Tab? Facebook will offer you fields to complete and you should seek to fill them out as best and as thoroughly as you can. The main fields include:

Short Description

Long Description

Company Overview

Mission Statement

Web Address

Contact Information

Location (For Local Businesses)

Make sure you keep the descriptions short and sweet to capture attention. Wingstop keeps it simple by telling you what they offer and how long they've been in business. There's not much more you need for a successful short description, but without it, you're losing out.

Offer Value in Line With Your Goals

You often get out of your fans what you give them. The best Facebook Business Page tips are all about building brand loyalty, awareness and increasing your overall engagement. If you want a loyal and engaged group of followers, then seek to offer as much value as possible.

Teach your audience about your business. Offer free resources. Share a tutorial video on how to best use your product or service. If you add value with lots of free tips and content, followers will be more willing to send money your way when you do present a paid product or offer. Peg Fitzpatrick offers massive value to her audience with her weekly Q&A videos.

Experiment With Your Posting Schedule

You can find some guidelines online with sample posting schedules, but you will get better results if you tweak your schedule to your specific audience. Experiment with the times of day you post and how often you post. Track the results. You can vary your posting schedule by scheduling your posts ahead of time.

You can easily schedule Facebook posts through Sprout Social's social media publishing tools. Additionally, Sprout offers its ViralPost publishing tool, which finds the best times in the day to post your content. Take the stress out of knowing the best time to publish and allow Viral Post to do the heavy lifting.

Try ViralPost for a free 30-day trial.

Go Visual With Graphics

People adore sharing quotes, memes and fun graphics because they add an engaging visual element to your content. Rather than just letting Facebook generate a picture from your link, it's a good idea to switch things up by uploading your own optimized graphic.

These type of posts often get more engagement. You can then share your link and description in the content area, but your post will look better in the feed.

Sandi Krakowski does a great job of creating her own branded graphics. Notice that she has included her handle, a hashtag and a nice quote.

Embed Videos Viewers Can Watch Right on Facebook

Recording videos is a great way to allow your audience to see the real people behind the business. You can use video to give your audience engaging, behind-the-scenes content to offer value and/or show off products and services.

Jay Baer hosts a show called Marketing Marvels and he embeds it onto his Facebook Page. By doing this, he offers his followers value while bringing more awareness to himself and his business. He starts out the video by saying who he is and what he helps you (his follower) do. He also has his video branded with his name at the bottom of the screen.

Enhance Your Page With Tabs & Apps

Did you know that you can add tabs and apps to your Facebook Business Page? Apps are a great way to enhance your page and provide your users with more features. Imagine being able to add your restaurant's menu, run a poll or quiz and even present an opt-in form right on your Facebook page.

Custom tabs and apps allow you to do all that and more. You can also add feeds to your blog or link your social media profiles through custom tabs with this feature. Some businesses have the ability to add “services” and “appointment” tabs.

Guy Kawasaki has an Events tab that allows fans to see all his upcoming webinars so they can get involved.

There are numerous apps available for Facebook Business Pages. Social Media Examiner does a nice job outlining the best apps to enhance your Facebook Business Page.

Optimize Your Page For Mobile Views

More users are perusing Facebook from their mobile devices. According to recent statistics, there are 823 million mobile-only Facebook users. Because of this, it's important to test your page on a variety of devices.

What looks great on a desktop may not look professional on a smartphone. Test your page at a variety of different resolutions and try to adjust your posts and content accordingly. Facebook has updated pages to be more appealing on mobile. One way to enhance this is to make sure you have great call-to-action phrases. The CTA button now appears under your cover photo on Facebook Mobile Pages. Make Your CTA strong and in line with your page goals.

Target a Specific Audience With Ads

One of the better Facebook Business Page tips is to use Facebook ads. They are a great way to share your page and get your business found. But you don't want just anyone liking and following your business page. You want to reach a targeted audience that is actually interested in the topics of your business and what you share.

Facebook allows you to target a specific audience by interests, location and more. Ads can help you not only drive sales for your product or services, but also bring awareness to your brand. Visit our Facebook Advertising Guide for more information on optimizing your ads.

Putting It All Together

Managing a Facebook Business Page takes some strategic planning, but is worth the effort to reach such a large audience. As long as you have your About section optimized, post regularly, share helpful and visually appealing content and test along the way, you are likely seeing good results.

Keep working at it and making adjustments along the way. Find pages in your niche that are doing great and see what they are sharing and how they are interacting with their audiences. Stay current, but on brand. You will want to stick to your business's tone and voice. You can collaborate, manage, analyze and report with Sprout Social's robust Facebook management tools.

You can make use of current events, holidays and trends when relevant. Share your business page with your populated link. Add it to your email signature. Invite your friends and colleagues to like your page. You've put in the work, now be proud.

Even if you're running Facebook for small business, there are opportunities to grow and be successful at Facebook. Have any ideas or comments about your own Facebook Business Page tips? Comment below!

This post Are You Missing out on These Facebook Business Page Tips? originally appeared on Sprout Social.