Even though Facebook is viewed and used as a fun, social space, its brand building potential is unquestionable. You can establish your brand on Facebook in subtle and creative ways, by giving people the information they want; as opposed to just marketing your company. This information may not be directly related to the product or service you offer but helps establish trust in your brand. Through engaging communication and visuals, you can promote your brand and its values.
Here are some of the ways you can use your Facebook company page for branding:
1. Use eye-catching visuals that represent your brand
With the repetitive use of design elements that represent your brand, people will associate certain visuals with your company. These can be the same visuals that are used on your website and can help increase brand awareness. They can be used not only in your cover picture (or video) and profile picture but also in posts that you publish. Profile and cover pictures are important because they are the first to be seen when people search for your page, or when someone shares your page. They should be appealing and represent the brand clearly. You can also use your cover picture to showcase your products. Adidas has an eye-catching cover picture that shows their shoes in various colors. Simple, clean and creative pictures communicate what the brand does, and what the tone is.
2. Communicate your brand’s core values
Your brand story can be told through your timeline. Company history along with changes in direction can be communicated to tell people about why you prioritize some values over others. Milestones can be highlighted and obstacles faced can be shared. For example, you can highlight why you use environment-friendly raw materials to make your products. This can be a way to bring attention to and market these products. It may help increase the brand recall value.
In the ‘About Us’ section of your Facebook page, you can define your mission. This gives a good context to tell people why you share the information that you do. You can highlight your strengths and the things that set you apart from your competitors, your USPs. For example, you can emphasize your timely delivery of the products, their affordability, or good customer service. You could even try pinning an engaging, impressive ‘About Us’ video to the top of your page.
3. Define the purpose of your Facebook page
By defining short-term goals, you can modify your Facebook page to suit that purpose. If you want to increase sales, you can offer coupons with unique codes on it to track people’s purchases. This can help you market the products to suit their preferences in the future. If you want to drive more traffic to your website, you can upload infographics with links to related blogs on your website. If your purpose is to engage with your audience, you can ask people questions about products design and their preferences, as well as their views on related topics. This also helps you get better insights into people’s preferences and how they are likely to view future products, as well as how they respond to marketing and branding content.
4. Know who your specific target audience is
Now that you know what your main purpose is, you can be clearer about who your target audience is. Knowing this, you can focus on certain aspects of your Facebook page. For example, if you know that a large proportion of your target group uses a phone to access Facebook, you can make the page more suited for mobile use. Keeping in mind the composition of your audience in terms of gender, age and location, you can make posts that appeal to them based on these aspects. Knowing the audience – their spending habits, purchase behaviors, job titles and products used – can be especially useful when selling products to them in the future. This can help build and sustain good relationships, and encourage people to view your brand in a positive way.
5. Post the right content at the right time
Your page description should be concise and include keywords, so that it will increase your visibility. The website, office address, phone number and email address can be given in your description for people to contact you. The type of page and category should be correctly entered, so that people looking within that category can find your page. You can plan the posting of content well in advance by scheduling posts on Facebook, which can ensure things are posted at the right time. Engage with your audience to a greater extent by posting regularly. For many brands, the right time to post is found to be weekday afternoons. You can get 2.3 times more engagement when you post pictures along with text. The correct image to word ratio is important. Videos are also engaging forms of providing information, but should contain captions since only a few videos are viewed with the audio on this platform. Facebook live is an effective way to broadcast an event or product launch to those who are not present. This has three times the visibility than other videos.
The right content can involve useful tips, updated industry news, as opposed to only marketing the product/service. Updates about your products, offers, and prices should involve things that are hard to find but are useful to your target group. Nike doesn’t focus on the product itself, but on the research done on the design used, indirectly showing that the product is of high quality. They have separate pages for different products, because these involve different target groups. Even so, they maintain consistency on their pages. TOMS shows how for every purchase of coffee beans on their website, a week-supply of water is given to people who don’t have access to basic resources. Thus, the content is about how buying their products helps underprivileged people, and not about the product alone.
6. Promote your posts for greater visibility
After you have made quality posts with the right content, you can promote these posts at the right time. This can be done organically, for example by getting your employees on Facebook to share your posts can be effective. This helps build your network. By monitoring and responding to comments, you can make clear what your brand tone is. This will also increase the engagement of customers and help them relate to you better. Sharing blogs and roundup posts can get various different untapped audiences to your page.
You can also (pay and) boost your posts that are present on the page. You can choose your audience, budget and duration while doing so. These posts can be directed to the desired target group, based on age, gender, location or other aspects. An objective can be prioritized and selected such as website clicks or social media engagement. You can also pin older posts, to make them appear on top of the page, even when newer posts are added.
7. Create quality advertisements
Using the brand awareness objective tool, you can make an advertisement for the target group interested in the content you have created and that can remember your advertisements,. The local business promotion tool can be used to reach a greater number of people. This involves choosing a clear objective for doing so – whether to get more likes, get more people to contact you, direct people to your website etc. There are greater options for meeting different objectives (as compared to boosting posts) such as store visits, conversions and lead generations. So you can optimize your ad better and reach your target group more efficiently using advertisements. There are other settings available that help target those people that have previously viewed a large percentage of the videos you have uploaded. It also allows customization for mobile and desktop devices. You can use messenger ads and audience network ads. There are more options for manual bidding, which allows you to choose how much you want to pay for a certain result (clicks, views) as well as other aspects. It provides more creative options when you are making your ad, such as carousel ads, customizable headlines, descriptions and appropriate call to action buttons. You can include details related to identity (logo, brand colors), reward (coupons, discounts), tone (such that it is uniform across Facebook), and action (clear and precise call to action) in your ads that can help increase brand awareness.
8. Get insights on how to improve your posts
By getting information on your target group, frequent visitors on your page and people on Facebook, you can modify your content to better reach the people you want to. It helps you know your audience better. You can get information on their age, gender, education levels, lifestyle and job titles among other aspects. Insights also can give you an idea of the consumption patterns and preferences of people. It shows performance data on each of your posts, giving you invaluable information about which posts work best, so that you can modify future posts and better interact with your audience. You can also get feedback on how effective your ads are. You can get insights on your customers by asking them what version of a certain product they prefer, get feedback and reviews.
9. Use Facebook as a platform for two-way communication
This platform, when used effectively, can give you the unique opportunity to connect with your audience directly. In the case of an event or product launch, behind the scenes posts can be made. Interviews of the judges of the event can be shared. In other contexts too, industry chats and conferences (that give valuable information) can be set up on Facebook. You can participate in discussions. Contests and campaigns can be arranged. Prizes (related to your products) can be given to increase participation. You can conduct surveys that people are interested in, which will benefit you too, by giving you information on customer behavior.
10. You can direct leads obtained on Facebook to other media platforms
The newsfeed can be linked to pages of your website. A product that has worked on your website or through email marketing can be used on Facebook. When people click on an ad displayed in their Facebook news feed, they can be redirected to your website. The action that a person takes on Facebook, such as like, or comment, can be reflected on your website page. There can be a call to action given at the end of your posts and ads on Facebook, such as a CTA asking them to sign up for newsletters, or watch a sample video, or attend an event or download an infographic on your website. Other social media profiles such as your Instagram and LinkedIn profiles can also be connected to your Facebook page.
11. Run a strong branding campaign
You can create advertisements for your branding campaign and use retargeting for reaching people you haven’t before. There is also an opportunity to collect data, in order to know what ad is working well with a given target group. There are options to control aspects such as budget, bidding, and targeting. You can post content on Facebook to build brand awareness. Visual posts (especially videos) that are funny can be especially effective. The content submitted by followers on Facebook can also be used in posts. It gives you an opportunity to engage with your target group – by providing customer care, answering their questions and being a part of the discussion. Hashtags can get you more visibility. This can help more people understand what you value.
By using visually appealing elements that represent your brand on your profile and cover pictures as well as in your posts, you can reinforce your brand image. Facebook can also help you focus on a clear purpose, and on your specific target group, so that you can modify the content to suit them. The posts can include pictures, videos and greater visuals. Once you have good quality posts, you can promote them with the help of your employees, friends or customers. You can also use Facebook tools such as boosting your post to reach greater people. There are various advertising tools on Facebook that have a lot of customizing options available to meet various objectives. Try using tools on the platform to get insights on your customers, their demographic information and the posts as well as products they like. You can connect with your audience better through chats, online conferences, campaigns, contests and surveys on Facebook. It is an effective platform for branding campaigns.
We can help you evaluate the visuals you are currently using in your communication, to see if they effectively convey your brand’s core values and brand persona. For an assessment, and to get designs that work, contact us: https://www.chittlesoft.com/contactus.html
