Your Socials are watching! Part 2 - The first social media for businesses
Hello,
Now that your business project has been accepted, it's already time to start the networking period, to promote your products or services of your upcoming enterprise. Why not starting to present your project, and your first virtual corporate identity, by opening a professional page on a social media.
Less expensive than a website, it's a safe bet to say your social will probably become your first official entrance into the business world.
I am continuing the adventure of corporate representation through social media by presenting this article about the first business account for startup, i.e. the first two years of existence of a company registered in Quebec, Canada.
As usual, I suggest listening to a song via the following YouTube link while reading my posts. This time, the MusicScore is the remix of an old Dusty Springfield classic, Spooky, from Tom & Collins - Spooky (feat. Grace Galu). Enjoy!
Here is an article about our business image on social media, part 2, 2024. Launching the first social as a startup, tips and advices for entrepreneurs and marketers.
The first page of a company on social media
There are a lot of possibilities when we have to choose the first professional social of a company. We will be able to talk throughout the year about the use of other social media, but for this article we are focusing on Facebook and the Meta service.
I choose Facebook because it is, for the most part, the first social network that is developed in most markets for businesses. In addition, it offers via the sharing options the possibility of posting on Instagram, the possibility of creating Stories and Reels, which is currently very popular in brand representation, and that it offers the possibility of free training on all the products useful in digital sales, whether you use the paid publishing service or not and the publication scheduling platform.
(For help with your first paid campaign on Facebook through the Meta service, you can read the Meta for Business post and paid ads.)
Prepare to open your first Facebook account
Coming from the field of entertainment and ticketing, I have been influenced by the sales methods of these markets for nearly 20 years. When possible, I like the possibility of starting to publish information about an entrepreneurial project even before the physical opening, or the final presentation of the product or the service.
This creates endless networking and promotional possibilities as teasers, such as launch date announcements, pre-event countdowns and presales, disclosures of information such as official hashtags, website opening and links, presenting the press release and even starting prospect search processes.
In addition, these pre-launch ads will significantly reduce the cost of your first paid promotional marketing campaign in your company's presentation, once opened, since you already have subscribers following you.
Like musicians and their demos, I like the ability to get to know a company from the beginning and see the evolution of the brand, which will one day end up on Wikipedia without you having to write your own page. Of course, I emphasize this point of longevity with humor, but I strongly suggest you approach the task of preparing to manage your social accounts by looking in long term when comes the time to think about your brand representation and your virtual image. The writings remain.
Somes rules need to be cleared from the start
Define at the origin what you want and above all, what you do not want to see on your company's page and mention these rules to each person who will be posting and writing for you on your social media. Here are some examples:
Decide the king of language to use with fans. A professional approach using the Mr. and Mrs. pronouns, or a friendly approach using the first name of users.
Decide how to sign the posts. If a word in your slogan has a S in capital, it should have an uppercase S every time the slogan is written in the communications.
Decide on your official hashtags and use them correctly without spelling mistakes.
Prepare the contingency plan, which is to decide who will take care of urgent and legal emails and use private messages to refer upset customers when the situation arises to avoid negative conversations and comments that we don't want to see public on our corporate socials.
Decide in advance on the periods of study of statistics, whether monthly or yearly, and put everything in your agenda in appointment. The study of our social statistics is essential in 2024 and it is also necessary to plan a period in the agenda, so someone does it eventually in the administrative tasks of your operation. I'm going to talk a lot about it over the course of this year; The November 2024 Monthly Tickets will be entirely dedicated to the analysis of data and statistics. Let’s remember knowing our statistics means knowing our customers and subscribers to perfect our existing relationships while giving us clues for the search for prospects, in addition to allowing us endless sales opportunities and savings on the advertising and marketing futures campaigns by using accurate and verified data in our targeting options. It’s a Marketing Thing.
Organizing the first social business account
Before you get started, it's important to ask yourself what kind of content you want to publish and the number of posts per week based on production capacity will be posted. I give an example using the introduction of a new column from an existing Facebook page to reach a new audience. Will it be published once a week throughout the year and, and most importantly, will you still have time to write de column? Take the time to prepare everything before announcing and then having to stop a great content trend, creating dissatisfaction for your members.
Also think about the visuals to plan, including the images for the holidays, Halloween and Christmas, to produce all this content in only one shot. When using a Graphic design service, plan for the long term by creating several visuals at once rather than one by one. And yes, there are many of us in the design field who create holiday images in the middle of summer, don’t worry.
For this blog, I create the annual visuals myself. Since I publish 12 monthly and 12 articles a year, and I only manage this blog for a few hours a week, I must plan tasks in advance and group my production to fit in with my time, right? I proceeded to create the article images for each monthly post, whose topics I had already determined beforehand (what is called a content direction plan that is put in a document called a Media Kit to promote advertising services) and I also took the opportunity to size these images of the size of social posts, also making sure to have a promotional visual for each article, programmed in the CMS of my website. Finally, since my social posts are scheduled to be shared when an article is published, I only have one hour of writing left to do per weekday and a few additional posts that I keep for pleasure on the socials and voila, the management of the writing and the constant publication of this blog is set for the year, Articles are automatically shared on social media when published.
Advertising
View your enterprise services and identify your service settings
In the setting of your account when starting to fill the information to open a new page, for restaurant entrepreneurs, for example, Facebook's business page allows you to display your services, with menus option, shop items and more. It's good to use this service listings, helping with the indexing of your business page on the Facebook platform.
On the settings side of your business page, we can also choose business categories, also related to the indexing of your page. Categories will increase your chances of being found in searches, especially if your business name is not directly associated with your job title. For example, if your business is called Chez Laurent, not everyone will know that it is a garage or a café, so you will miss opportunities without the help of categories and services. I would never, in my life, had typed Laurent to find the closest garage in town.
It is now also possible, in this section of the settings, to mention if your business or office is in a shopping mall (the located there option to check) and options for home workers who do not want to mention their physical address, which was a bummer for a lot of users before. These details will also meet the criteria of nearby business researchers to help finding your page.
Fill in all the possibilities for displaying company accounts
Yes, search tools now deliver social media pages and content in their results. This is how you should take advantage of it and fill all the display spaces on social networks.
Your profile picture and banner image should be accompanied by texts featuring your basic business information and relevant links to direct readers to your current site or promotion. Your hours of operation and contact information should be up-to-date, and website links and email should be functional.
We must remember that more than half of the visitors on the average websites and social media use their phone, opening the small images to see the profile and banner pictures, thus opportunity to put a selling text.
Also, remember this detail when creating your visuals if you need to put text on the images. Consider testing them to make sure your text will be large enough to be readable on mobile. I regularly send myself private posts with campaign visuals that I check with my mobile to make sure the text is readable in a small screen format, especially the posts on which I will put a promotional budget with Meta.
The first publication of your new account
The famous welcome message on a new page, which will often be pinned to the top of posts for the first few weeks, is important. It usually includes the image with logo and slogan and a message of presentation of the business and redirect link, if your website already exists. Don't forget to include your keywords, hashtags and slogans.
The message should be addressed to both local and national visitors, so it should be written in general, without dates, unless you will remember to change the dates and content once the day arrives.
You can also explain in your next post the direction of the page content if you find that your first post is too long.
The number of publications per week
The pace of your posts is different for every business. Communications agencies and media outlets tend to publish several times a week, other specific production and manufacturing companies will need only one publication per week. The important thing is to stay constant, so visitors see the activity of the media and hopefully subscribe to you page and site. In addition, regular posts show that you respect your audience and your followers, and this meets Facebook's requirements in the proper use of the platform, a good performer, if we can explain it that way. However, having a good performance doesn't just mean publishing, you also must participate.
An active account must include at least one post per 7-10 days and be active in liking, commenting, and participating in external content. So, posting 30 posts in 3 months and not posting anything for the next 2 months won't help your performance.
Having a good performance in the platform will allow you to be actively seen by your followers too, as your content and page represents what Facebook wants to present to its followers.
Poor performance will require to restart your good habits of activity, to win back the good performer little heart of Facebook. That's why your participation rate, unless you set a budget to reach all your subscribers, will take a few weeks to get back to a good performance. It's explained briefly, but I'll leave the Facebook Business guide link at the end of the article for more details.
Publishing Scheduling with Meta Business Suite
Of course, one of the most popular platforms now offers the possibility to schedule posts in advance, because managers also have the right to sleep and have a life outside of their jobs, right?
The Meta Business Suite (Meta BS) programming tool is very useful and allows you to publish on Instagram, create Stories (published on Facebook and Instagram) and Reels, the video trends since the spectacular arrival of TiK ToK. Although there is a 30-day limit in the publication scheduling tool, it is possible to use other tools, and other means, to achieve long-term publication scheduling.
For this blog, in addition to automatic shares when a new post is published, I use Meta BS to schedule daily announcements and promotions and holiday posts, because I also want to celebrate myself and not be in front of the computer or on my mobile. However, don't take too much time off, as on social media, holiday periods are often the most profitable in several areas, with e-commerce remaining open 24/7. Don't leave these periods of opportunities without content on your social media and instead take advantage of them to pin your best offers, your followers mostly follow you for this kind of actions, you know.
With a few posts and a few followers, the Meta BS tool will show you the highlights for your next posts, spotting the periods your followers are most likely to read posts based on their usage habits. This information is valuable to know, especially for your first few months of managing your account, where there are often few tools to measure the progress of a project whose sales or physical traffic is not measurable because it is not yet available for purchase.
We should also consider looking at the performance statistics of our publications in the statistics options and adjusting our editorial staff accordingly.
My advice is not to make a hasty decision in options where the content doesn't seem to take off yet, in terms of popularity. Of course, allow at least a good trial time of several weeks before drawing conclusions and destroying the texts of your unpopular column; Maybe it's the visual that's missing from your campaign. Be sure to read the next point: pre-release testing.
Test your content before publishing
How can we avoid publication blunders, typos in texts, links that lead to an error page, visuals with texts that are too small and loss of reproduction of erroneous campaigns? Here's my trick: try your publications internally and ask your colleagues to check it out.
This is also my advice for topics that you are not sure about, ask your colleagues and even go outside your department to get other opinions, if confidentiality allows it.
To test, you can also post a private message to yourself from your personal Facebook account to test the result of your post before publishing it on the company page. This is what I often do to check the quality of my visuals on the small screen, especially for images that will be in the home banner, so that text is not hidden by the location of the profile picture, for example.
To learn more about using Facebook and Meta, I suggest Meta's free Blueprint courses.
Conclusion
Ah, the publishing scheduling tools so dreamed up by the first generation of webmasters and social media writers/publishers.
You know that in the early years of Facebook, the people who managed social didn't really have an official name or title in companies? You'd be surprised at the title of the signature of several marketers from the 2000s! Some were in the technical departments, others sat squarely with the accountants in the finance department. Time and technology fly by, don't they? And that's fine.
I conclude this article by inviting you to read part 1 of the report Your Socials are Watching and remember to always leave a redirect or subscribe link in your posts. Always think like marketers by giving a follow-up to your reader who now has your attention. Thus, I just subtly did so by redirecting you to another article on the same topic in this conclusion. It's as simple as that, always a link and if possible, one more link too.
Thank you,
Jeff
Source: Facebook Business and Best Practices for Posting to Your Facebook Page for the First Time.
Images credit: banner image from pexels.com.
Your Socials are watching - The Serie
Your Social are watching - Part 1 - The business social media
Your socials are watching - Part 2 - The Company’s first Social Media
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