Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in February 2004 and since then has been ruling the social media world. The social media giant already has 2.45 billion active users on board in September 2019. Facebook Messenger even has about 1.3 billion active users. All other popular social media platforms such as Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, and WeChat are lagging behind in the race.

Today, Facebook is not just merely a platform for meeting your old college friends and getting connected with them, but a powerful venue to project and promote your business amid potential customers.

Facebook welcomes all; whether you are a large business enterprise, a small local business entrepreneur, or a startup. It offers you a stage where you can easily reach your target audience and create a distinctive brand image.

So, let’s discuss how you can leverage the advantage of Facebook to effectively promote your business.

Maximize the Use of Facebook Business Page

Facebook provides a separate business page, which is a great marketing tool for all entrepreneurs. You all enter all details regarding your business, add products and services, add your location, business hours and your website. Furthermore, you can also add and share images, videos, and links to give the business a personal identity and character.

Facebook provides you with the option of 6 different types of business pages to market your products and services. These include –

1. Local Business or Place
2. Company, Organization, or Institution
3. Brand or Product
4. Artist, Band or Public Figure
5. Entertainment
6. Cause or Community

You can choose any of the page types depending upon your business.at at the same time, it’s also equally important to consider what your key audience is looking for. Keep sharing images and videos to connect them with your business. Always look to post something interesting that your audience would enjoy viewing.

For example, you can create funny and meaningful videos to make new product announcements and product explanations. A combination of humor and information is going to drive traffic to your page.

Making Use of Facebook Ads

Facebook also provides you with the facility of advertising your products through Facebook ads. You can find it in the side column of the site. These are known as classic ads or marketplace ads. These types of ads usually include an image, a copy, and a link that takes the user to either your Facebook page, mobile application, or your business website.

Facebook ads contain the following essential features-

• Targeting your audience through demographic categories such as age, gender, location, education, user interests, and others.
• You have the facility to set up your ad budget estimate.
• Test your ad in different versions

However, since Facebook does not release any data or info on Ad Click-Through Rate (CTR), you can find it difficult to measure the success of Facebook ads. If you compare Facebook ads with Google Display Ads, the former generates a CTR of 0.051% with a Cost per Click of $0.80.

With Facebook advertising, you can get various benefits such as increasing your likes and shares.  You can also convert a visitor into a follower and then into a potential buyer. It allows your posts to appear on your Facebook news feed.

Hosting Facebook Contests

Another effective technique to promote your business is through hosting contests that draw the attention of the users. It also helps in enhancing the number of fans as well as increase brand awareness.

However, there are a few points that you need to keep in mind. First, you cannot host the contest through the Facebook page itself. It means you cannot ask your users to give likes or comment on the post. You have to use any other third-party app to create the contest and direct users to that app from the Facebook page.

You can take the help of various free as well as paid tools to get free contest templates. But there is a condition that your page must have around 2k likes. You may try the free third-party app versions, but your options will be limited.

Use of Sponsored Stories

Sponsored stories are a type of marketing tactic through which you can know the user’s interaction including his likes and comments.

The main focus of Sponsored Stories is on the ‘word of mouth’ marketing concept. For instance, if you see that a few people have liked a certain page, it means they will be paying more attention to it. The main aim of Sponsored Stories is to encourage the users to take some action and not just like or comment on the post. You can even choose to show the likes or people who have claimed the offer.

When a person performs any action, a page like or an offer claim gets automatically posted on the user’s news feed. Sponsored Stories are not only confined to likes and offer but are also used with Facebook’s Open Graph app.

The social media giant claims that Sponsored Stories have 46% higher CTR and 20% lower CPC compared to regular Facebook ads. You can easily develop Facebook Sponsored Stories using a Facebook ad to create flow. On the other hand, the open-graph Sponsored Stories will require you to use third-party apps.

On An Ending Note

There are some other effective Facebook marketing techniques that you can simply employ to promote your business such as Facebook Exchange and Facebook Promoted Graphs. You can use these marketing tactics as all of these will allow you to connect with millions of worldwide users.