Facebook Business Page Marketing Tutorial

July 9, 2014

Whether you use your personal Facebook page to promote your business or not, you should also have a business or a fan page depending on the nature of things you are promoting. It is considered good practice for businesses to have their own Facebook business pages, and for public figures to have fan pages.

You can use your business page to try some promotional tactics that you may not necessarily want to do on your personal account. You can also get many strangers to like your business page without having to friend them all, which is something that would ruin your personal account if you suddenly had hundreds or thousands of strangers posting random updates on your feed.

A Facebook fan page works very close to how a business page works. The distinction is that fan pages are for people who are celebrities, and business pages are for brands. Brands and businesses are two terms that are often used interchangeably in the social media marketing world.

For the most part, fan pages tend to have quite a bit more engagement than business pages because people like following other people rather than some businesses.

The challenge with business pages is that Facebook isn’t very supportive of businesses that want to leverage it to get free traffic. They have no incentive to let marketers drive people away from Facebook to their sites for free. If you pay Facebook, then sure, you can drive as many people from their site to your site as you can pay for. But if you want to use Facebook to get free traffic, Facebook puts some limitations on what you can do.

When you make a status update on your business page, Facebook shows you the number of people who saw your update (they don’t show you that for your personal account status updates). Brands (businesses) tend to have a very low percentage of people to whom Facebook actually the posts made by that brand on its Facebook business page.

Let’s take the Facebook business page for my problemio.com business apps as an example. That business page has nearly 600 people who liked that page. Here is the link to the page if you are curious.

When I make status updates on this business page, Facebook tells me that as low as 15-50 people saw that post out of the current 573 people who have liked my Facebook page. That is a very small percentage of all the people who liked my problemio.com page. Let’s explore why this number is so low.

First of all, Facebook has an algorithm that determines to whom them will show the updates of a business page. No one except the people working at Facebook knows exactly how this algorithm works, but many Facebook users are beginning to figure it out little by little from basic trial and error.

A part of Facebook’s algorithm is skewed to not show my updates to most of the people who have liked my business page because ultimately Facebook wants me to pay in order for me to be able to reach everyone who liked my business page. The other thing that the algorithm considers is the engagement of the people who see the updates of my Facebook business page. For example, if I make a status update, Facebook might show it to 20 people and monitor the engagement signals for that post. If people engage with my status update, it is a sign that my status update is good, and Facebook shows it to 20 (I am using this number only as an example) more people, and monitor the engagement of those people to decide whether they will show the status updates to further Facebook users. Unfortunately, in my experience (and many other business owners I surveyed) it is rare that Facebook would show a status update to too many people.

That brings me to an important point of whether we, as business owners, should funnel people to like our business pages on Facebook if we can’t actually reach them there afterwards. After all, people don’t just magically like your Facebook page, right? You actually have to make an effort to invite those people to like your business page. Some business owners even pay to get people to like their Facebook business page. But even if you didn’t pay actual cash, it still cost you your time and effort to promote your Facebook page to people. Plus, when you created the call to action for people to like your Facebook business page, you had people’s attention. You could have used that attention to get people to do things that are more beneficial to your business like actually buying your product, or giving you their email address (at least you would know that the email gets sent to them unlike with Facebook where you have to wonder whether they were shown your status update).

As you can see, choosing to get people to like your business page has its pitfalls. Free Facebook marketing isn’t as free as people think. And don’t forget, when you are sending people who are not on Facebook at a given moment to engage with you on Facebook, you are essentially promoting Facebook. Think about who helps whom more. Does Facebook help you? Or do you help Facebook more by sending people to engage with you on Facebook?

Here is a bonus tutorial with 25 ways to promote your business on Facebook.

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Here is a video about my book on Facebook marketing for business.

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