The 5 Facebook Marketing Mistakes your Business Needs to Stop Making Today

Facebook is a powerful marketing tool for small businesses. Between business pages, ads, and groups, you could create a huge lead generation machine all on a single platform. 

If you haven’t started a Facebook strategy that combines all these features, we recommend revising your current strategy. We aren’t saying you need to drop everything you are currently doing to focus on Facebook, but we are suggesting you review your current strategy and make some tweaks. 

Here are five Facebook mistakes you could be making in your business.

5 Facebook Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Make

1. Leaving fields blank 
2. Not including video or images in posts
3. Paying or begging for page likes
4. Ignoring negative comments
5. Automatic cross-posting from other social channels

Leaving Facebook Fields Blank 

Setting up a business Facebook account is much different than setting up your personal account. Facebook offers business owners a number of fields to fill out that help the viewer learn more about your business. 

Some fields are straightforward while others are not. For instance, adding your phone number, business address, website URL, company profile image, banner image, and hours of operation all are easy to do. However, these are not the only options you should be completing. 

Hidden in your profile are long and short descriptions of your company plus a company overview section. These areas are easy ways to add a few keywords, more information about your company, and show off some of your company assets such as products, services, or specials. 

Did you know that you can also alter your Facebook business page URL to be custom to your business? For example – Facebook automatically populates a domain similar in style to this: facebook.com/page/123456788901345532/ 

Are you ever going to remember all those numbers or letters that automatically populate? Probably not, which means your fans won’t remember it either. Instead, you can request to have your link be: facebook.com/BUSINESSNAME/. 

Not Including Video or Images In Posts:

Facebook gives you the opportunity to post images, gifs and videos, create polls and share links. With so many options available to make your content pop, it seems silly that anyone still uses text-only content. Without an image, your text-only post will likely be overlooked or not even appear in news feeds. 

Remember, Facebook prioritizes content that has high engagement. Getting video published on your Facebook Business Page is essential to your long-term social strategy if you want to remain relevant to your fans.

Paying or Begging For Page Likes:

An old strategy for businesses used to be to ask your customers to like your page consistently until they finally did it. Another strategy used to be to set up a campaign to pay for page likes. 

Both strategies are outdated and should no longer be used if you want to create a business page that’s not full of fake fans and followers. 

Each fan that your company has should be someone who is either going to recommend your company, who is going to subscribe to your free information, or who is going to purchase your products or services. Anyone other than that isn’t useful in growing your business and should be looked at as such. 

A good rule of thumb is unless you are running a contest, it is inappropriate and ineffective to ask for likes. It comes across as desperate and is actually frowned upon by Facebook. If you’re directly asking for likes in your posts, Facebook considers those posts spam and if it flags you as a repeat offender, you could see your reach plummet.

Ignoring Negative Comments

Comments are a great thing for your Facebook posts. If you happen to receive a negative comment don’t ignore it. In fact, this gives you the perfect opportunity to showcase your company’s customer service skills and how you handle conflict resolution. 

It’s been noted online that many customers like to see both the good and bad when making decisions on which products or services they feel comfortable purchasing. Don’t be ashamed or nervous about negative comments or reviews on your page. Instead, handle them with care, compassion, and in a timely manner. 

Automatic Cross-posting From Other Social Channels 

If you have your account set up to automatically cross-post from your other social channels such as Instagram and Twitter, disconnect this feature. Not only do brands look bad if they are constantly reposting the same content but your followers on one social channel may not be the same as another. You need to ensure your company is providing content your audience wants, which means channel differentiation is important. 

Should your social channels have follower overlap, those followers may get bored or annoyed if they see the same content on all channels. 

If you’re not able to create different content per channel, it’s acceptable to use the same articles and concepts on both accounts, but try to vary the delivery so that the post plays to the strength of each platform. On Twitter, you have to be brief and to the point. Facebook gives you more room to breathe and entice the viewer. Use the flexibility to your advantage.

Are you ready for even more tips on how to use Facebook marketing to your advantage? Check out our webinar recording, “How to Grow Your Business With Facebook” to learn more valuable tips on 10 ways you can use Facebook for your business.