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How to… Facebook for Business

Are you not sure what to write on your business Facebook page? It’s significantly different to posting on your personal profile and can sometimes leave people stumped!

Here at Function28, we want every company, big or small, to succeed in promoting their company on various social media platforms. We’ve put together a handy guide on what you should be doing on Facebook for your business.

1. Profile Picture
Let’s start with the very basics. On many occasions in my travels, have I seen companies NOT using their logo as their profile picture. If you would like customers and new followers to find you easily, use your logo or relavent imagery. When it comes to your Cover Photo, make it engaging. For example, if you have some professional photos of what your company can create, showcase them here.

2. Choose the right buttons
When you create your Facebook business page, you’ll be asked what Call-to-Action button you’d like to be featured at the top of your page. Think to yourself, what action would you like your customers to take? Would you like them to message you, call you, or visit your website?

3. About You
When creating your Facebook Business profile, you should be filling in the About section. This area will tell potential followers more about what you do and they’ll get a feel for the page before they Like it.

4. Find your voice
When speaking to an acquaintance a few months ago, she was looking for social media help for her own business – I gave her one rule, “just be yourself!”. As a company, you will have a ‘voice’ that you’d like to get across to your followers. A lot of companies take a relaxed tone to their social media posts, it really of course, depends on your type of business.

Have an enthusiastic tone to your posts – no one wants to read something where the author doesn’t really care!

5. Content
Facebook is a great way to engage customers and followers using great content. You’re building your brand and talking to your customers directly, finding out what makes them tick and why they love your brand.

Your content should be 80% entertaining, engaging, and informative. 20% is reserved to talking about your product. People don’t want to have products shoved in their faces 24/7 on Facebook. You don’t want to be losing followers!

Posting your text with images is a must on Facebook. Your followers are more likely to retain the information in your post if there is an image to go alongside it.

Mix up your content with amusing gifs, quizzes, and competitions. Ask your customers questions. Followers love to get involved in conversations, and like it even more when you reply directly to them.

Make sure you know about all the holidays and event days. You can jump onto the relevent topics on these dates and engage more people – you can find a great calendar here.

6. Research
All businesses look at their competition to see what they are up to. When it comes to social media, what are their weaknesses/strong points. What would you do differently? What would you ‘borrow’?

7. Post at the right times (and not too many times)
This does depend on your type of business but the general concesus is to post on early Friday morning, and Tuesday, between 6-9am. As time goes on and you post more, Facebook Insights is a really handy tool to know when most of your followers are online. You’ll be able to find out when it’s a good time to post in order to get the best engagement.

When it comes to frequency, my rule of thumb is 3 days a week. Too little, less engagement, too much… well, less engagement!

8. C2A
All your posts should have a Call-to-Action. What would you like your followers to do? Go to your website, post in the comments, send you a message? Don’t leave them hanging!

9. Promote Your Page
When you first create your page, a great way of growing your page organically is to invite your friends and family to Like and Share the page. But if you’d like to reach out to a bigger audience, a paid ad is the route to go down.

You can either promote a specific post, or promote your whole page with the view of gaining more followers, there are pletny of objectives you can choose from.

You can set your budget, timeframe, and audience type in the Facebook Ads section. It doesn’t take long to do at all.

10. Share News and Hot Topics
Brands on all platforms went to town over the hoo-ha at the Oscars this year! Jumping on to the latest news and hot topics will get you in front of more people and could gain you more followers. Ask what your followers think about the topic you’re posting about to get that engagement.

There you have it! 10 tips on how to use Facebook for your business.If you’d like a more in-depth conversation about social media, and how it can work for your business, please phone Gemma on 01884 308091, or drop her an email on gemma@function28.co.uk.

View our others blogs here.

Brand New Website from F28

We’re very proud to present to you a brand new website that we have created for Cockleshell Endeavour, which went live this weekend.

Cockleshell Endeavour team. Mick and Steve with fellow veterans.

Cockleshell Endeavor is a project to support veterans through water-based adventures. The projects was founded by Mick Dawson and fellow Falklands veteran, Steve Sparkes in 2018. They’ve been doing fantastic work with war heroes throughout the UK ever since.

On April 2nd, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Falklands War, Mick and Steve started a 650-mile paddle. They started from the Commando Memorial at Spean Bridge, Scotland, and they hope to reach the Yomper statue at Southsea on June 14th, the date which marks the end of the war. They hope to do most of this by kayak. Along the way, they’ll be meeting with veterans to gather stories from those personally affected by the 1982 war.

cockleshell website — Cockleshell’s fully mobile responsive website.

Mick and Steve were after a fully responsive website to tell the world about the brilliant work they’ve been doing over the past 4 years, and to keep followers informed about the progress of their fundraising journey, through the website blog and newsletter.

The two are looking to expand the website over time, to keep followers up to date with activities and fundraisers they can be involved with.

We’re very proud here at Function28 to be supporting Mick and Steve at Cockleshell Endeavor on this amazing adventure and we wish them the very best!

If you are able to, you can donate on their website here, and follow them on Facebook to find out more about their charity and progress.

To find out more about our other website projects, please visit our Blog.

Keep up to date with everything going on here at Function28, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Is TikTok damaging its own USP?

It was announced a few days ago that TikTok will be increasing its video length to a whopping 10 minutes long. Over the past few years, the platform has been steadily increasing the length of videos, with the maximum of 3 minutes being rolled out last July. Is TikTok damaging its own USP by doing this?

What does TikTok say?

A TikTok spokesperson said in an interview, “We’re always thinking about new ways to bring value to our community and enrich the TikTok experience. Last year, we introduced longer videos, giving our community more time to create and be entertained on TikTok. Today, we’re excited to start rolling out the ability to upload videos that are up to 10 minutes, which we hope would unleash even more creative possibilities for our creators around the world.”

History

TikTok started back in 2018, and thanks to the pandemic, hit stratospheric levels with the amount of times the app was downloaded (it hit a total of 2 BILLION downloads in 2020!). People saw it as a boredom buster, and funny videos took their minds off being stuck indoors. The platform’s USP was its plithy, and short videos which have struck chord with many, leading some to become huge stars off the back of the app.

Imitation is the best form of flattery

So many other platforms have tried to copy TikTok’s success by introducing their own short video option, i.e. Reels on Facebook and Instagram, Shorts on YouTube. If others are copying you, surely you should be secure in the knowledge that you’ve invented a really cool thing?!

F28’s opinion

We’re not entirely sure why TikTok has made this decision. We think they want their users to stay on the platform longer and perhaps feel under pressure from its direct competition, YouTube who have always preferred longer content.

In our opinion, this move will narrow the difference between TikTok and YouTube. With attention spans getting shorter and shorter, even a 5 minute video runs the risk of losing your attention. A 10 minute video will get less engagement than that of a standard 15 second TikTok. Extending the video length may well switch off big creators on the platform, and therefore, could hurt it financially.

It feels like we’ve been here before though. Way back in 2017 with Twitter changing their character limit from 140 to 280, there was a huge uproar at the time but the platform doesn’t seem to have changed significantly as people had thought it would.

If the app did go under because of this decision, it would be a big shame. Whilst some might not ‘get’ TikTok, it has undoubtedly changed the way many businesses around the world connect with, and market to their followers. You can see the huge cultural impact it’s had everwhere you look.

Let’s see how this pans out!

If you have any questions about your social media marketing, please contact Gemma on 01884 308091.

Check out our other blogs here.

Function28 teams up with council for key campaign

Function28 is very proud to announce that we have joined forces with Somerset and North Somerset Council to promote their Safer Streets Awareness campaign.

Background

The Safer Streets campaign is part of a wider, national campaign to stop violence against women and girls (VAWG) in public places.

With the tragic killing of Sarah Everard in March last year, it became increasingly obvious that attitudes towards women and girls needed to change. The government soon launched a nationwide initiative. Somerset and North Somerset Council put in a joint bid and were awarded funding in the latter half of 2021.

Function28 has worked previously with the council on their, ‘Healthy Teenage Relationships’ campaign. We were over the moon to find out we had been selected to take part in this new project.

The Campaign

Campaigns run previously put emphasis on women and girls to change their behaviour in order to stay safe. The Safer Streets campaign has turned that around.

The brief was to change attitudes through education. We focused on how certain acts and words are wrong, and by bringing attention to the unsettling statistics on sexual harrassment on UK streets.

We worked closely with our contacts at the council to get the imagery and tone just right for this senstive campaign.

This was to be a far reaching campaign, across many different mediums.

Our work will be seen on bus stops and on buses around the county of Somerset for the next few months. The radio ad is now playing on Heart Somerset FM, and the website www.saferstreetsawareness.co.uk went live in January. The social media campaign will be running on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with a big ad campaign going live on YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat very soon.

This project was one of the biggest in Function28’s history. The campaign was organised in a matter of two months, with a Christmas break in the middle! We coordinated with local companies, to help us get the project off the ground, especially when it came to filming. Find out more about these amazing people here – Nigel Payne, Ryan Hallett.

We’ll put up another blog with the full results of this campaign once it is all wrapped up, so please keep an eye out!

To find out more about this important campaign, visit www.saferstreetsawareness.co.uk and follow the hashtag, #itcanstop on Instagram to keep up to date.

If you need help with campaign management or any aspect of your marketing, please give us a call on 01884 308091 or email us on info@function28.co.uk.