Getting started with Facebook for small businesses

Facebook is the world’s biggest social media platform, with around 2.6 billion monthly active users. Because of its large user base and insight into what its users like, it offers a powerful yet practical way to advertise your small business. 

If you’re starting a new business or are looking for new ways to attract customers, find out how to get your business started on Facebook in this guide by Countingup.

Find out how to get started on Facebook by: 

• Creating a Facebook Page for your business
• Growing your business’ audience
• Advertising your business on Facebook

Whether you’re starting a new business as a sole trader or setting up a limited company, keeping your finances can be a burden. Discover how Countingup can help you save time and stay focused on building your business. 

The Page feature on Facebook is the main way this social media platform hosts business content. 

Creating a Facebook page is free and allows customers to easily find your website and any updates about your business. To set up your new business page, you’ll need: 

• Information about your business (its name and a description of what you do)
• A photo (e.g., your business’ logo or a picture of your work)
• A website link or contact number (for more information or new inquiries)

If you already have a Facebook profile that you’ve been using to promote your business, you can convert your account into a Business Page using Facebook’s online tool here. 

Like a regular Facebook profile, Facebook Pages can share text and image posts, video updates and event information, as well as tag locations or other accounts. Using these basic tools, marketing your business can be simple. As you trade, you can share updates on your offers, pictures of works in progress or completed projects, or announce new products. 

Your Facebook Page also allows you access to Facebook’s Creator Studio, letting you schedule content for posting ahead of time, and better manage your Page’s engagement. Having the ability to schedule content means that you can develop better marketing practices. Setting some time aside to schedule content each day allows you to make sure your Facebook Page is active and engages customers with new updates even if you’re busy with something else. 

Creator Studio also lets you manage your message inbox, post notifications, and provides data on the types of customers that interact most with your content and how. With these handy tools for your business, you can keep on top of customer inquiries, like and share customer testimonials, and track your activity with your audience.

Growing your audience using Facebook can involve organic growth. This is where the content you share naturally does well on social media: people who see it like, comment and share with their social networks because they find it interesting, engaging or entertaining. Building a healthy following for your business this way is free (other than your time) but can be difficult.

If you’re looking to use organic growth on Facebook, make sure your post captions are informative, engaging and your pictures show parts of your work your customers are interested in. This way, customers can spend more time on your Facebook posts and you’ll increase your brand awareness effectively.

If you’re looking to market your business well on a small budget, you can use stock image websites and free image editing software. These tools offer you the ability to source professional images to use or edit your own. Improving the quality of your Facebook marketing is as simple as adding your business’ logo, a filter, and some informative text on top of an image you’d like to use. 

From here, as you upload content with Creator Studio, your business appears more professional and polished – making your business more engaging and interesting to your customers.

Organically growing your audience on Facebook is about focusing on the quality of content you’re sharing. Facebook offers other versatile tools to grow your audience where you can conduct online versions of more traditional marketing content. These can include giveaways, competitions, viewing parties, Q&A sessions or charity collaborations.

Unfortunately, creating sustained and engaging content for your business can be challenging. If you’d like certain posts or updates to be more effective, Facebook offers advertising solutions to help your content reach your target audience.

Facebook is most valuable to your business as an advertising platform. Using paid promotion, Facebook can share your content more widely – appearing on the Facebook feeds of people beyond your Page’s organic audience for an advertising fee. 

Using Facebook’s user data, you can share an advert to reach as many people as possible or to target specific audiences that are most likely to be interested in your business. This allows your business to easily expand its customer base and make people aware of you as you get set up.

If you’d like to know more about advertising on Facebook, they offer useful online marketing and advertising tools for new small businesses, helping you establish what you want as you advertise and informing you how to do it best.

Facebook can only share and target audiences with what you’ve given them – therefore, paid promotion isn’t a silver bullet to make your Facebook marketing perfect. Even if you pay lots of people to see your advert, you should still aim for your Facebook posts to be interesting to potential customers.

As your business gets started on Facebook, consider using a combination of the steps above to improve your marketing and get more sales. 

Well produced marketing materials take time to make, share and manage. 

If you’re getting started with launching a new business, you’ll need to identify ways you can save time and stay focused. That’s where Countingup can help.

Countingup is your business current account and accounting software in one app. 

With all your accounting information in one place, we automate your financial admin so you can take your mind off your books.

With our helpful receipt capture tool and expense categorisation, you can make sure your records are always accurate. Our automated invoicing also means you can invoice on the go and save time on contacting clients for payment.

Most importantly, your business’ profit and loss reports are available in real-time, so you’ll be able to instantly see sales increases as you try new marketing strategies on Facebook.

Find out more here and sign up for free today.