5 Facebook Mistakes to Avoid

Today’s small businesses know they need to have a presence on Facebook. Facebook (and other social media avenues) allow you to communicate with current customers, promote your business to prospective customers and even to vendors. Facebook has so many uses for your business, but are you using it correctly? Here are five Facebook mistakes some small businesses make that you should avoid.

1) You set up a profile instead of a business page for your business.

This may seem pretty straightforward, but you'd be surprised by how many small businesses make this error. Facebook profiles are meant for individual people and Facebook Pages are meant for businesses.

2) You don’t monitor the posts or comments on your page.

The point of Facebook is to interact with your current customers and prospective customers that are already on Facebook. And, since Facebook has nearly two billion active users, it’s quite probably that your target audience is on Facebook. 

Remember the ‘social’ part of social media. When you set up your Facebook Page, make sure that you choose the publishing options for your Timeline that are appropriate for your business. Turing this option on allows your fans to post and leave comments on your site. That’s the social part. You can manage this by allowing your fans to post and leave comments on your but you must manually approve them before they show up. Some companies don't give their fans any publishing permissions at all. 

Once you have your publishing permissions set and are posting, don’t forget to monitor your page daily and respond to your fans’ comments when appropriate.

3) You don’t respond complaints.

What do you do it your fans leave a negative comment or complaint on your page? This will happen because you can’t stop people from saying things about your products or services, good or bad.

What you can do is respond respectfully and provide helpful information. Responding not only shows people you're concerned about their happiness, but also that you're engaged.

4) You don’t post videos.

In the past, photos dominated Facebook. Recently, Facebook made some changes and now images have the worst organic reach. Video is now the best post type for organic reach since Facebook’s most recent strategy shift toward video. You can still use pictures in your posts, but add videos to the mix.

5) Your posts are too long.

Surveys have found that shorter posts generate higher engagement. Concise posts of 1-40 characters generate the highest engagement.

Experiment and see what works best for your particular business and audience. The optimal length of Facebook posts will vary from company to company.