5 ways to improve your Facebook Business Page

When you create your Facebook business page, it is important to complete and optimize your profile as much as you can. You want your visitors’ to understand what is your business about and who you are in a few seconds. Grabbing your visitors’ attention right away is key to getting them to like your page. Below are some of the few things you can do to improve your profile.

Upon visiting a business page, the first thing you see is the banner. Visitors need to understand who you are and what you do within the first few seconds of visiting your page. A clear designed banner will help achieve that.

What you need to know:

• All covers are public. It will be visible to anyone visiting your page.
• Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading or infringe on anyone else’s copyright.
• You may not encourage people to upload your banner to their personal timelines.

We encourage you to read the official Facebook page guideline here.

If you hire a professional to design an image for you, it can prove be expensive. If you don’t have a team for your design and don’t want to outsource your design, you can save some money by doing it yourself with free and very simple to use social media tools. I previously wrote an article about these tools, feel free to take a look at them by clicking the link below.

6 free social media tools to design images

These tools use the latest dimensions for the Facebook banner and profile picture, so you never have to worry about it. For those of you, using design software here is what you need to know.

Anything smaller than that and your image will be expanded turned blurry.  As you can imagine, a blurry image is not very appealing and won’t compel anyone to follow your page. Make sure to use high quality image.

There are a lot of stock photography websites who offer free high quality images regularly. I have not yet written about it but I will compile a list for you; so stay tuned on that subject.

Your profile picture is by far more important than the banner. Visitors only see your banner on their initial visit unless they return to your timeline again, which rarely happens.

The reason why your profile picture is more important than the banner is the fact that this image is displayed in multiple places. You profile picture appears:

• Over the cover photo on your timeline
• When you reply to comments.
• In your followers newsfeed.
• When liking and commenting on other pages, while using your page.

Again, in order to design your profile pic, you can use the tools mentioned above, but if you are using other software here is the appropriate size.

Your uploaded picture may be 180 x 180 pixels but it is displayed as 160 x 160 pixels. Make sure to check how it looks and that nothing has been cropped out of the image. Ideally you should use your company logo if you have one.

Another important section to complete is the “About” section. This is where you have a chance to write in more details who you are, what you do and where you are located. It’s very important to complete this section with as much information about your business as you can.

This section can be different depending on the category you choose when you create a page. In case you don’t choose the right category, you will be able to change the category anytime you want after you created the page.

There a few things you should definitely do if you have a physical location. You need to provide your address, your contact information, your hours of business and your website. If you don’t have a physical location, don’t worry there is a place for you to write all your services. Facebook gives the option to display your services at the very top of your timeline with a small description and a small picture. The picture is the same size as your profile photo. 180 x 180 pixels but is displayed at 160 x 160 pixels.

One of the most important sections is the short description, which allows you to write up to 155 characters. This short description is displayed under your profile pic on your timeline for desktop viewers and it is also the default text used when you pay to promote your page but you can change the text if you’d like.

You can install third-party apps for your Facebook page. They will appear in two places on your page. You can access them by clicking the “More” drop down menu and they also appear in the left column under the about section.

I personally love this feature for many reasons, which I will mention in just a moment, but to be completely honest not everyone loves this because third-party apps are only visible to desktop users. Unfortunately, mobile users don’t have the chance to navigate your extra tabs for now.

Apps can be used for a variety of goals. I personally use them to display my other social media accounts, such as Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest because these are the right features to use for my business goals.

There are quite a few possibilities for tabs. Depending on your goals and your business you can use tabs to invite visitors to sign to your email newsletter, to read your restaurant menu, to download your e-book, to download coupons, etc.…

Tabs allow your page visitors to stay on Facebook and to check the products or services your business provides in more depth. I personally love when a restaurant has their menu on Facebook. It allows me to stay on Facebook, to read their menu, to see which items are the most popular and I find these restaurants tend to look overall more professional but it is my personal opinion, not my professionals.

Facebook is the network where people spend most time on, compared to other social media networks. Why not take advantage of that with quick and easy tab to navigate through.

Now we talked about the visual aspect of your page, it’s time to talk about the content for your page. You need to post content in order to attract visitors to your page. It’s simple no content equals no visitors.

Creating a posting strategy is the most important thing to do.

Facebook algorithm is changing frequently and in order to stay on top of your followers mind, you need to post a lot more than before. Posting update once a day is a very good place to start. It may seem like a lot but you don’t always have to share post about your product/service or your business.

In order to avoid looking completely narcissistic, it is good policy to share information about your industry or other information related to your business. It helps you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and also as being transparent about your business and your industry.

There are 4 different types of updates you can do on Facebook:

• Post/share text update.
• Post/share a link.
• Post/share pictures.
• Post/share videos.

Not all updates are created equally. As I mentioned Facebook algorithm is frequently changing and let’s just say that the last update will show videos in your feed more often than other type of update. In order to reach as many people as possible, I encourage you to post/share videos and to use Facebook Live to connect with your audience on more personal level.

Your Facebook updates should always contain #Hashtags. Hashtags have become essentials in the way we communicate online. They will allow you to organize your content and track discussions based on those keywords, so make sure you include them.  Now, don’t overdo it either, this is Facebook, not Instagram, therefore 1 to 2 Hashtags in your post should do it.

You may wonder when should you post on Facebook. As you may imagine it is better to post during the day when everyone is awake rather than at night when most people are likely to be sleeping. Ultimately your followers will determine when it is the best time to engage them and you can find this information by looking at Facebook Insight.

If you just created the page, then you will have to wait to gather more followers to determine this information. However, according to studies done with the US market, the best time to engage people is:

• Monday through Thursday between 18:00 and 20:00
• Thursday and Friday between 13:00 and 15:00

While this study found a higher engagement later during the day of the week, they also explain: “The less people want to be at work, the more they are on Facebook”.

Finally, scheduling all your post via Facebook is time consuming. The Facebook schedule tool is not the best but it get the job done. When you haven’t seen any result in your social media and are using this tool, you are most likely going to quit posting, so please do yourself a favor and stop using it right now.

Rest assured, there are a few third-party apps you can use to schedule your content not only on Facebook but also on other networks if you would like to.

I am using Hootsuite to schedule my content. Hootsuite has been around for a long time and offers great features.

First of all, Hootsuite offers a free version, which lets you connect up to three social media accounts. Second they let you schedule your content and easily edit if needed. Finally, they have an auto-schedule option, which schedules your post at the best time of the day based on your followers.

This concludes my article on how to improve your business page on Facebook. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me on how you improved your Facebook business page by leaving a comment below.