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Everyone knows what Facebook is. If Facebook was a country it would be the second largest, even larger than the United States. That’s impressive. A lot of small and large businesses are on Facebook. They’re trying to connect with their audience and trying to sell their product or service. However, with the new Facebook rules, this could be hard.
Facebook has come out and said that it will limit the ads shown on people’s news feeds even more. This means no more reaching 100% of our audience, or frankly, even 30% of your audience. Facebook did a recent study and asked people what they thought about the social network. They replied that they wanted to see less ads and more of what people cared about, their friends.
This doesn’t leave a lot of room for the small businesses out there that are trying to grow and gain traction. So what should the small business owner do? We’ve come up with a couple suggestions that will help your page be seen by more than 1% of your followers, which is the ultimate goal, right?
New Facebook Rule Sidestep 1: Make sure you have a small budget to spend on Facebook. Everyone is in the business to make money, including Facebook. In order to reach the maximum part of your audience you’re going to need to pay to do it. Right now, if you look at your Facebook page (and you have over a certain amount of likes) it will tell you how many people your page is reaching. On a page I just took over, the page has 103 likes and the last post I sent our only reached 9 people. That’s pretty bad.
New Facebook Rule Sidestep 2: Post ads on Facebook. Advertising on Facebook is where small business reach is headed. In order to do this there are a couple options for you. You can do a general ad to increase likes on your page. I like doing this because it increases the awareness of the page and you can target it to specific audiences. You can even target it to what people like or what language the speak.
New Facebook Rule Sidestep 3: Add a coupon to Facebook. Facebook started allowing businesses to post offers or coupons on your small business page. This enables you to get the word out about a special event or about something that you’re having a special on. I work with a tax company and they are giving $30 off personal tax services. I made this into a coupon on their small business page and targeted it to people around their office location.
New Facebook Rule Sidestep 4: Don’t boost posts. Why shouldn’t you do this? Because there is no rhyme or reason to who this is getting to. It’s basically a “throw it against the wall to see if it works” kind of way to advertise. Instead of doing this, go to the ads section, select a post you’d like to advertise with and then select the demographic from there. By doing this, you enable to post to be seen by a specific audience type and will get better traction from it.
With all of these tips, the new Facebook rules shouldn’t be a huge damper to your page. Your small business page should be able to shine and be able to be seen by more than that measly 1% of your audience. Remember too, you don’t need to spend millions of dollars doing this either. Even $5 per day or ever other day will increase the awareness of your posts.
For more information and tips on Facebook see our Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram pages or contact us here.
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