Social media has definitely changed the way that businesses market and advertise themselves in the 21st century. To successfully market your business, you have to be where the people people are, and Facebook is where over 2.41 billion monthly active users hang out.
While many IT businesses have pages on Facebook, not all of them know how to use it effectively for small business marketing and driving more leads. Learn how to get the most out of this popular platform, and you’ll see a big difference in the volume and quality of your leads.
If you’re using Facebook but not really getting much traction, or you want to see if there are tips you may have overlooked, read on for ways to maximize your Facebook marketing strategy for your tech services business.
Maximize Your Facebook Marketing Strategy
Facebook may have started as a social platform for college students, but it’s grown to a worldwide network where people of all ages spend at least part of their day. 74% of Facebook users visit the site every day and they spend an average of 35 minutes there.
80% of people between 18 and 49 use Facebook.
The sheer volume and scope of different types users on Facebook offers a great opportunity for businesses with smaller advertising budgets, because they can reach a highly geo or interest-targeted audience.
Whether you’re using only the free aspects of Facebook or investing in Facebook ads, these tips will help you get the most marketing benefit from this social platform.
Make Full Use of Your Facebook Business Page
Some smaller companies use their Facebook business page instead of a full website. While, we’re not suggesting it can replace a well-designed business website, what a Facebook page does have is multiple features that can be used to drive business to your site.
The platform has really beefed up their business page features over the last few years, so there may be some new options you’re not aware of. Here are some of the features you’ll want to take advantage of:
- Services: Showcase your most popular IT services
- Shop: Sell products or managed IT plans
- Offers: Entice people with discounts
- Events: Post IT training webinars or in-shop tutoring events
- About: Fill this out in full, with your phone number, email, awards, etc.
When you’re setting up a Facebook business page, you also want to pay attention to your cover and profile picture. It’s common to use your logo as the profile, just make sure it’s easy to recognize and not too small.
For your cover photo, use something consistent with your website branding so your visitors will have a consistent experience between your site and your Facebook page.
Earn the “Very Responsive to Messages” Badge
Facebook offers an alternate way for customers and potential customers to contact you and ask questions about your services. If they’re looking for an IT provider and see that one is more responsive to messages than another, it could be the thing that causes them to call you instead of a competitor.
You earn the “Very responsive to messages” badge on your business page by replying quickly to private messages. The requirements are as follows:
- A response rate of 90%
- A response time of less than 15 minutes
Until you earn the badge, you may see something like “Typically replies within an hour” noted on your page.
Add the Call-to-Action Button
The CTA button on a Facebook business page allows you to choose one of several actions that you’d like to urge your visitors to take. The call-to-action button is at the top of your page right under your cover banner.
Options you can choose include:
- Book Now
- Contact Us
- Use App
- Play Game
- Shop Now
- Sign Up
- Watch Video
Why use a CTA button on your Facebook page? For more conversions! CTA buttons added to a Facebook business page can increase click-through rates by 285%.
You can also boost your call-to-action using Facebook ads. We’ll get more into those next.
Try Out Facebook Advertising
Small business marketing budgets are typically tight, but Facebook does offer some extremely targeted and reasonable prices PPC ads.
The average cost per click (CPC) on Facebook for technology-related ads is $1.27, with all industries averaging $1.72.
Compare that to Google Ads, who has made it increasingly difficult for IT business owners to have their ads shown on the platform. Google’s average CPC for technology-related ads is $3.80, and their all industry average is $2.69.
That means that for around the same price as 1 click on a Google Ad, you get 3 clicks (and potential leads) on a Facebook ad.
Targeting in Facebook offers hundreds of combinations, so you can really zero in on your target customer personas and create separate ads for each one. For example, you might create different target ads for:
- Small businesses needing cloud hosting
- Residential customers with broken laptops
- Mobile users aged 16-30 for a mobile security app
- Accountants in New York City that need data privacy compliance help
Here are a few of the target categories you can choose from for your Facebook ads:
- Location
- Demographics (age, income, etc.)
- Interests (technology, Microsoft products, etc.)
- Behaviors (i.e. person that just visited your pricing page)
- Engagement (i.e. if someone has just liked one of your posts)
- Partner Connections (i.e. users that just purchased a new computer)
Boosting a Post
Another type of Facebook advertising is called promoting, or boosting, a post. Rather than create ad, you just pay to have more people see one of your social media posts.
You’ll see the Boost Post button available when you make a post, and often Facebook will remind you with a message in your feed about it.
Organic reach for businesses can be tricky and many businesses feel that Facebook has made it harder for their posts to be seen, because they prioritize posts from friends and family. So, boosting a post helps you gain more control over who you reach on the platform and allows you to reach a wider audience, not just those subscribed to your page.
The minimum spend to boost a post is $1 a day, and when you go through the targeting for your post, you’ll get a rough estimate of how many people you’ll reach per your budget.
Create a Facebook Group
Another way to take Facebook a step farther than just your business page is to create a specific Facebook group that invites engagement. You can do this directly from your Business Page and link the group to that page.
A group offers more opportunities for personal engagement, with members feeling free to share their own thoughts, questions, and memes in a Facebook Group they belong to. Where they wouldn’t really feel the same freedom to post like that on your business page.
You can focus attention on a specific call to action by pinning a post to the top of the group, generate polls that help you gain more user insight about your customer base, and build trust and friendship by offering information of value through your group page.
For a group page theme, you don’t want to just repeat your business name, but rather find a topic that people beyond just your current followers would be interested in. A group helps you widen your follower base and connect with many more people that you can with just your business page.
Some group theme ideas might be:
- Microsoft 365 Super Users
- Gamers and Our Custom Computer Builds
- (Your Town) Business Technology Forum
- I Grew Up in the Early Days of Tech
- Productivity or Bust (Never Met a Gadget We Didn’t Like!)
Analyze Your Page Performance
If you just keep putting out social media posts every day, but aren’t analyzing how they’re doing, you won’t be fully optimizing your social media message. Facebook provides page performance analytics that allow you to see which posts are performing best and what interactions people are taking on your page.
Go to the Insights tab at the top of your page to see your page performance stats. At the bottom under the main page analytics are your recent posts with their statistics on engagement.
Wondering if you should boost a post by promoting it through their advertising channel? The insights area lets you see which post is performing the best so you can choose that one to boost rather than a poorly performing one.
Use Facebook Video, Including Live Video
Video gets high engagement marks across all different types of platforms and Facebook is no different. Facebook videos get about 8 billion views a day, that’s both posted videos and live videos.
Sprout Social has some interesting Facebook video statistics that can really help you zero in on the best ways to present video on Facebook.
85% of Facebook videos are watched without the sound on.
A large percentage of videos are watched with the sound off on Facebook, so if your main video content is spoken, then you’ll be missing out on engagement opportunities. To make a video still relevant without sound, use text overlays, such as this video that the Tech Blog Builder crew did for Jackson Technical.
Get some tips on making great videos here.
And don’t shy away from doing a Facebook live video. People spend 3x as much time watching them as they do a pre-recorded video.
Just because it’s “live” doesn’t mean you can’t be prepared. Decide your topic, such as “Q & A on 5G technology”, have some questions and answers already prepared to start off with, and have someone there helping to read the user’s comments while you’re answering their questions.
This is a great way to get to know your page followers and your group members and it helps them get to know you too. Afterall, someone is much more likely to purchase services from someone they feel they know and can trust.
Interact with Your Followers
This is true of all types of social media, you don’t want to treat it as a broadcast channel where you’re just putting out your posts, but not engaging with commenters or asking your followers questions.
See who is commenting on your posts and reply back to them. Many of these may be potential leads with IT questions, others may just be posting a positive comment about your post. Either way, it’s good practice to reply, even if it’s just with a thumbs up emoji.
71% of consumers that have a good experience with a company on social media are likely to recommend it to others.
To help keep up with replies, you can set up Facebook alerts to notify you of replies to your posts or direct messages that are sent to your page.
Experiment with Facebook Stories
A new feature that’s been brought over from the Facebook-acquired Instagram platform is Facebook Stories. These are visual posts using photos or videos that are only visible for 24 hours. Although you can revisit them later in your story archive.
Like Instagram, Stories are meant to use the image as the main component with maybe a little text or call to action overlay. They also come with all types of camera effects that you can add to your visual (Rocket raccoon mask anyone?)
Why use it? Facebook Stories has about 500 million users now and has well surpassed Snapchat. You’ll also notice that Facebook has put a Stories area right at the top of your newsfeed, so it’s a great way to get noticed.
Some ideas for a Stories post might be:
- Short-term Flash Sale
- Pets of (your company)
- Showing off holiday tech (like those light projectors)
Make the Most of Facebook Marketing
Facebook continues to evolve and add more features for businesses to market their products and services. It’s also a bargain when it comes to PPC compared to Google Ads. Make the most of it by exploring all its opportunities!
How has Facebook advertising worked for your tech business? Do you have your own Facebook Group? Tell us in the comments!
