How To Use Facebook For Business 101: The Amazing Facebook Masterclass

In July 2023, ProfileTree delivered a live webinar on how to use Facebook for business. As the most popular social media platform in the world, Facebook presents an amazing opportunity for businesses of all sizes to promote their products and services on a global scale. Social media has proven to be an outstanding marketing tool for businesses, and so utilising Facebook for business can help you generate leads and sales online.

Facebook Masterclass Overview

In this blog, we’ll take you through everything that we covered in our Facebook webinar, from how to outline your social media strategy, creating effective organic content, scheduling content, utilising Facebook Insights, and utilising social media advertising. By the end of this guide, you’ll know exactly how to use Facebook for business and create effective social media content.

Outlining Your Social Media Strategy

When it comes to understanding how to use Facebook for business, it’s important to outline a social media strategy. Think about a social media strategy as a New Year resolution with practical steps and tasks outlined that you will take in order to achieve your goals and objectives. A social media strategy allows you to take a step back from your Facebook page and ask, “What do I want to achieve with my Facebook business page?”. 

By determining the type of content and brand messaging you want to produce online, you can ensure that your approach to Facebook is informed and allows you to align your content effectively with your goals and objectives.

Content Pillars

A great way to kickstart an informed social media strategy when learning how to use Facebook for business is by outlining your content pillars. Content pillars are three to five topics that your social media content will focus on in order to communicate your brand messaging effectively and also drive sales and conversions. Content pillars are a great way to remain focused on your Facebook content and also serve as a reminder of the purpose of your content.

Some of the benefits of using content pillars when it comes to how to use Facebook for business include:

• Consistent Messaging: Ensuring that each Facebook post is consistent with your brand messaging, therefore making your brand more recognisable.
• Create Purposeful Content: Each piece of content that you produce when it comes to knowing how to use Facebook for business should resonate with your target audience. Content pillars ensure that your content is produced with your target audience in mind with a clear purpose behind it.
• Saves Time: Content planning can be challenging when thinking of the next big unique idea. However, content pillars serve as a reminder of core topics that your content will focus on, therefore saving time trying to brainstorm new ideas.
• Establishes a Clear Brand Identity: When thinking about how to use Facebook for business, it’s important to consider how your brand identity will stand out amongst competitors online. With content pillars, you can have a clear blueprint for your approach to content, making it easier for consumers to recognise your brand identity.

Example of Content Pillars

So, what do content pillars look like for businesses when knowing how to use Facebook for business? Let’s say for example, you are a hairdresser looking to increase your list of clients and will utilise social media to communicate your brand messaging. Some of your strengths include delivering high-quality customer service and offering a wide range of hair products for clients to use at home. 

In this example, you could produce the following content pillars to align with your brand messaging and key strengths:

• Educate clients on how to use hair products.
• Showcase the personalities of each team member.
• Focus on sharing client reviews and hair transformations.

These three content pillars align with the example’s strengths and objectives as educating clients on how to use hair products will help the hairdresser communicate their expertise on hairdressing and the quality of their hair products. In this way, they will educate their audience on Facebook about how to use the hair products, therefore giving them a reason to purchase them with this new knowledge and information.

Next, showcasing the personalities of each team member will help the hairdresser communicate their high-quality customer service and introduce their audience to the faces behind the team. If you are a business that relies on physical visits to a store or location from your customers, showing the team is particularly important as this removes any form of unfamiliarity or uncertainty for the customer about who your team is. Therefore, the more your customers see your team, the more likely they will book appointments and visit your physical location.

Finally, focusing on sharing client reviews and hair transformations will help the hairdresser showcase the quality of service their current clients are receiving. This form of testimonials and transformations is effective at generating a fear of missing out for the consumer and showcasing the evidence behind each of your positive claims. Therefore, this type of content is a great way to utilise how to use Facebook for business and increase your current number of customers.

Overall, these three content pillars will help the hairdresser remember how to use Facebook for business by generating content to reflect each of their pillars. No matter when this business owner decides to post on social media, they can be sure that their outlined content pillars will keep their goals and objectives focused and will help save them time in the future when deciding what to post.

Creating Effective Organic Content

The key strategy behind how to use Facebook for business is creating effective organic content. Organic content is basically any content that you publish on Facebook that is your own creation, including Facebook Reels, any article links included in captions, images, etc. Organic content is critical to the success of a Facebook business page as this will ultimately give your audience a reason to support your page by liking or following your page and engaging with your content.

For example, imagine you were looking to book a reservation at a restaurant and wanted to have a look at the opening times, menu, and some images of the interior. You may choose to search for this business on Facebook. Once you find the page, you discover that the restaurant hasn’t posted any new content in the past three months and has very little content to browse.

Unless you directly contact the business, you may start to question what the restaurant offers, who runs the restaurant, and even if they are still in business. In today’s digital age, it’s important to understand how to use Facebook for business as consumers view social media pages as portfolios of a business’ work and identity. Therefore, creating effective organic content is essential to capturing your audience’s attention and generating engagement and sales.

How To Create a Facebook Post

When learning how to use Facebook for business, you’ll need the following “ingredients” to build effective organic content:

• An engaging hook.
• Clear and valuable information.
• A clear Call-To-Action (CTA).
• An eye-catching image, graphic, or video.
• Hashtags.

Let’s break these ingredients down to perfect your organic content on Facebook and how to use Facebook for business.

How To Use Facebook For Business: Hook

A hook is a short statement or question that will grab your audience’s attention to read the rest of your caption. Let’s say, for example, a hairdresser wrote the following hook: 

“Shampoo for sale”. 

Although this clearly outlines what the post will be about, it’s not particularly engaging or encourages the reader to continue to read the caption. In this case, a more engaging hook would look like this:

“You are NOT washing your hair properly❌”.

This hook is more effective at grabbing your audience’s attention as the audience will now begin to ask questions such as, “What do you mean?”, “How do you know this?”, and “What can I do to change this?”. Therefore, you are giving your audience a reason to read the rest of your content. So, be sure to grab your audience’s attention early!

How To Use Facebook For Business: Clear and Valuable Information

Now that we know how to use Facebook for business in terms of capturing your audience’s attention, it’s time to sell your products and services to your target audience through clear and valuable information. Continuing from the previous example, let’s say a hairdresser writes the following information after the hook:

“All of our shampoos are half-price this weekend.”

Although the business owner has clearly communicated the important information, it’s not entirely valuable to the user as not all users may know exactly what products the business stocks or why they need them. To improve this, the hairdresser could write the following information:

“Most of us are making these crucial mistakes when washing our hair:

❌Using the wrong shampoo for your hair type

❌Not emulsifying the shampoo

❌Using conditioner all over your hair.”

In this example, the hairdresser has now delivered clear and valuable information by separating different points out clearly that are easy to read and also educating the audience on common mistakes that they are making. By doing this, the hairdresser can showcase their expertise, give valuable information, and promote themselves as a solution to all of these issues. Through this process, you can use Facebook to communicate valuable information with your audience and encourage them to utilise your services to maximise your advice!

How To Use Facebook For Business: Clear Call-To-Action

A Call-To-Action is a sentence that encourages the user to take some form of action to interact with your post and business page. This is the part where you want to encourage your audience to take action based on all of the valuable information they have read. Let’s say a hairdresser outlines the following CTA:

“Shop now”.

Although this CTA clearly states what the business owner wants the user to do, it may raise questions for the consumer, such as “How do I shop?”, “Where can I buy your products?”, and “Can I purchase online?”. To avoid this confusion for the consumer, the hairdresser can instead produce the following CTA:

“Click here to discover which hair product is best for you 👉 [Insert a URL link to your stock]”.

In this example, the hairdresser has emphasised why the consumer should shop the products by discovering hair products that work best for them and has inserted a URL link to relevant stock. 

It’s important to note that the destination link should be the most relevant URL for the consumer based on your Facebook post. For example, if you are discussing how to use your products or services, ensure to link the exact product or service page that you want the user to go to. 

The amount of time the user spends on your website is critical, and so directing the user to the most relevant link will minimise the chances of your customers becoming confused or frustrated trying to find your products and services themselves. This ensures that once you have learned how to use Facebook for business, you can direct your audience to the correct website links.

How To Use Facebook For Business: Media File

Next, upload your media files, such as an image, graphic, or video. This should be visually appealing and eye-catching, as this will ultimately stop the scroll. Consider utilising text within your images, graphics, and videos, as this is useful when communicating your brand messaging in a clear and concise manner. Media files are important when understanding how to use Facebook for business, so the media file should be clear, visually appealing, and stop the scroll.

How To Use Facebook For Business: Hashtags

Finally, include hashtags related to your products and services that align with keywords that your audience would use in the search engine to discover your content. For example, a hairdresser could include hashtags such as #hairdressersbelfast, #hairstylingtips, #hairstylist, etc. This will ensure that the Facebook algorithm will recognise what your content is about and promote it to the correct audience.

How To Plan and Schedule Content

When it comes to how to use Facebook for business, planning and scheduling your content helps ensure that you have a consistent posting schedule and can understand exactly what different types of content you will be posting.

The main benefits of planning your content include:

• It gives your content structure.
• It’s useful as an archive.
• Boosts productivity.
• Provides a bird’s eye view of content.
• Keeps you in line with your strategy.

A content calendar is a fantastic way to organise and plan your content, as it is widely used among business owners and marketers. Here are the main elements that should be included in a content calendar:

• Incoming or outstanding pieces of content.
• Social media posts.
• Planned promotional activity (e.g. digital ads or influencer activity).
• Images to accompany written content.
• Links for SEO purposes.
• Any edits to existing content.

Some popular scheduling tools to schedule your Facebook posts when understanding how to use Facebook for business include Meta Business Suite and Buffer. No matter what scheduling tool you use, you can ensure that your content is created in batch, scheduled to go live, and saves you time when creating and posting content on Facebook.

How To Utilise Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a fantastic tool to utilise when it comes to how to use Facebook for business. This tool allows you to analyse the performance of your page and posting content. To access Facebook Insights, access your business page and select ‘Insights’ in the side menu. From here, you can access insights into how your page is performing overall and also the engagement of each social media post. 

The key metrics that are important to monitor include:

• Impressions: The number of times your content was on screen. This may include multiple views of your post by the same people.
• Reach: The number of people who saw your post at least once.
• Engagement: The number of times users engaged with your post through likes or reactions, comments, shares, saves, or clicks.
• Link Clicks: The number of times a URL link was clicked (E.g. A website link).

Facebook Insights is an underrated tool when it comes to how to use Facebook for business. By using this tool, you can identify which posts are performing well, generate the most engagement, and discover what content you should be focusing on more of in the future.

How To Utilise Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are a great way to increase your reach on Facebook. As a general rule, social media advertising should be used as a way to support your existing organic content, as organic content is ultimately the key strategy to growing your business online. 

When creating a Facebook Ad, you may be faced with the decision of either creating your Facebook Ad from scratch or simply boosting a post. Boosting a post means that you pay a set amount of money to get a larger reach on an existing Facebook post. However, creating an ad from scratch means that you can generate an advert to promote your business whilst targeting a specific audience.

It’s important to note that boosted posts aim to generate more engagement on an existing post, such as likes, comments, and shares, whereas a Facebook Ad aims to generate more link clicks. When deciding which option is best for you, it’s normally best to invest in Facebook Ads as you can specifically target your audience while strategically using your budget. Facebook Ads will help you put everything you’ve learned about how to use Facebook for business and target your audience through paid advertising.

Factors To Consider

Here are the main factors to consider when setting up your Facebook Ad:

• Goal: Is your goal to get more website traffic, get more phone calls, promote your business locally, or get more page likes?
• Target audience: What age is your target audience? Where are they located? What are their interests?
• Budget: With daily budgets, Facebook will spend only up to the amount of budget per ad set you give it per day. When setting up lifetime budgets, you give Facebook the budget you’d like to spend for the entirety of the campaign and then choose the date the ad set should end. 

When determining your budget, evaluate the estimated reach and link clicks that will be generated based on your budget, as this will help you decide how much money you’re willing to spend in order to achieve your desired results.

Instagram Ads and Placements

Once you have learned how to use Facebook for business, you can then consider your advert placements. The great thing about using Facebook Ads Manager is that you can select the exact placements of your advert on Facebook and Instagram. For example, you can select if you want your advert to appear in Facebook and Instagram Stories, in-feed, and Facebook Marketplace.

When selecting your placements, consider if the format of your ad set-up is appropriate for Instagram. For example, Instagram Stories are more engaging and user-friendly as an image or video in portrait mode as this is most suitable when viewing on mobile. Therefore, consider if your file format and image dimensions are suitable for Instagram Ads, as this could impact the engagement of your ad on different platforms.

Overall, understanding how to use Facebook for business can skyrocket your sales and leads and build brand awareness. The opportunities available for businesses on Facebook are incredible and this guide will help you with your social media strategy.

Want to know more about how to use Facebook for business? Get in touch with ProfileTree today to find out how marketing on Facebook can help you generate sales and conversions!