Facebook Helps Small Businesses Tweak Social Media Marketing

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Website? Check. Social media? Check. Blog? Check. As a small business owner, you’ve probably made sure you have these basics of marketing in today’s technology-driven age covered. But unfortunately, simply having them doesn’t mean they’re doing any good. Most small businesses don’t have the luxury of having a small team dedicated to maintaining a site, developing social media content or updating their blog with fresh, new posts on a regular basis.

The rapid growth of social commerce, or ecommerce that takes place on social media platforms, should single handedly be enough for any small business owner to put an emphasis on their social media strategy. According to Invesp, social commerce will be responsible for $14 billion in sales for 2015. So no wonder larger businesses are doing everything they can to leverage social media for more sales.

But many small businesses struggle to do the same. Whether it’s because of a very restrictive budget, time constraints or lack of knowledge, small businesses can have a hard time using social media marketing effectively. And Facebook realizes this.

Normal Facebook Posts Reach Less and Less People

The bad news for businesses posting on Facebook? Facebook has recently been making some drastic changes to how they determine what shows on a user’s newsfeed. This has a bit of an uproar among some business and marketers. It’s harder to get posts seen on the newsfeed and has severely limited the reach that many posts get. A nicely done graphic that would have once garnered a good amount of views and click throughs may very well not be seen at all now.

In turn, this could be the reason Facebook’s ad revenue has been rising. They hit $3 billion last quarter. Sure, we don’t know how much of that is tied to small businesses. But they admit that a good portion of it is.

More Businesses Turning to Paid Facebook Ads?

The good news for businesses posting on Facebook? Facebook is taking the initiative to help them get the most out of their Facebook marketing… mostly through helping them understand how to use paid Facebook ads to the biggest bang for their buck. Facebook Small Business Boost sets up training at different locations that businesses can sign up for. And many have found this training to be helpful.

For instance, take Jayden Frost from Lewisville, Texas. He attributes the majority of his vintage toy store success to Facebook, saying that Facebook is where 95 percent of his customers come from. Or Kepler’s Books, who has had such great success with Facebook that they spend more on ads here than they do on newspaper ads.

While the training is important, what some say is even more eye-opening are the sort of peer to peer panels that take place. Facebook chooses businesses in the area that have had great success in using the different marketing tools they offer to talk to the other small businesses in attendance and share what’s working for them and why or how.

If done right, paid Facebook ads can have a very positive outcome. Ads can be shown to a select group of people, whether that’s people interested in a certain subject or people that live within a certain geographical area. But the key is in understanding how to effectively use the tools available and understanding who’s an ideal customer.

Other Resources:

http://bizbuzzblog.dentonrc.com/2015/03/business-owners-flocked-to-lewisville-for-facebook-training.html/

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/03/25/how-facebook-is-courting-small-businesses-and.html?page=all

Veronica Davis