Starting The First Social For Businesses
The Reports - Your Socials are watching! Part 2
Hello,
Now that your business project has been accepted, it’s already time to start the networking period, to promote your products or services of your upcoming enterprise. Why not start to present your plan, and your first virtual corporate identity, by opening a professional page on a social media?
Less expensive than a website, it’s a safe bet to say your social will probably become your first official entrance into the business world.
I’m continuing the adventure of the corporative image and branding through social media by presenting this article about the first business page for startups, i.e., the first two years of existence of a company registered in Quebec, Canada.
In this report:
Learn how to maintain an efficient social presence without spending all day online.
Discover simple, consistent habits that keep you relevant and visible.
Get actionable tips to build trust and create long-term engagement with your audience.
As usual, I suggest listening to a song via the following YouTube link while reading my posts. This time, the MusicScore is the remix of an old Dusty Springfield classic, Spooky, from Tom & Collins - Spooky (feat. Grace Galu)!
Listen to the MusicScore complete list on YouTube! Enjoy the Music at Work!
Here is an article about our business image on social media, part 2, 2024. Launching the first social as a startup, tips and advice for entrepreneurs and marketers.
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The First Page of a Company on Social Media
There are a lot of possibilities when we have to choose the first professional social of a company. We will be able to talk throughout the year about the use of other social media, but for this article we’re focusing on Facebook and the Meta service.
I choose Facebook because it is the first social network that is developed in most markets for businesses. Also, it offers via the sharing options the possibility of posting on Instagram, the possibility of creating Stories and Reels, which is famous in brand representation, and that it offers the possibility of free training on all the products useful in digital sales, whether you use the paid publishing service or not and the publication scheduling platform.
(For help with your first paid campaign on Facebook through the Meta service, you can read the Meta for Business post and paid ads.)
Prepare to open your first Facebook account
Coming from entertainment and ticketing, I have been influenced by the sales methods of these markets for nearly 20 years. When possible, I like the possibility of starting to publish information about an entrepreneurial project even before the physical opening, or the final presentation of the product or the service.
This creates endless networking and promotional possibilities as teasers, such as launch date announcements, pre-event countdowns and presales, disclosures of information such as official hashtags, website opening and links, presenting the press release and even starting prospect search processes.
Also, these prelaunch ads will significantly reduce the cost of your first paid promotional marketing campaign in your company’s presentation, once opened, since you already have subscribers following you.
Like musicians and their demos, I like the ability to get to know a company from the beginning and see the evolution of the brand, which will one day end up on Wikipedia without you having to write your page. Of course, I emphasize this point of longevity with humour, but I strongly suggest you approach the task of preparing to manage your social accounts by looking in the long term when it comes the time to think about your brand representation and your virtual image. The writings remain.
Some Rules Need to Be Specified From the Start
Define at the origin what you want and above all, what you don’t want to see on your company’s page and mention these rules to each person who will be posting and writing for you on your social media. Here are some examples:
Decide the king of language to use with fans. A professional approach using the Mr. and Ms. pronouns, or a friendly approach using the first name of users.
Decide how to sign the posts. If a word in your slogan has a capital S, it should have an uppercase S every time the slogan is written in the communications.
Decide your official hashtags and use them correctly without spelling mistakes.
Prepare the contingency plan, which is to decide who will take care of urgent and legal emails and use private messages to refer upset customers when the situation arises to avoid negative conversations and comments that we don’t want to see on our corporate media.
Decide in advance on the periods of study of statistics either monthly or yearly, and put everything in your agenda in appointment. The study of our social statistics is essential in 2024 and it’s also necessary to plan a period in the agenda, so someone does it eventually in the administrative tasks of your operation. I’ll talk a lot about it over the course of this year; The November 2024 Monthly Tickets will be entirely dedicated to the analysis of data and statistics. Let’s remember knowing our statistics means understanding our customers and subscribers to perfect our relationships while giving us clues for the search for prospects, besides allowing us endless sales opportunities and savings on the advertising and marketing future campaigns by using accurate and verified data in our targeting options. It’s a Marketing Thing.
Organizing the First Social Business Account
Before you get started, it’s important to ask yourself what content you want to publish and the number of posts per week based on production capacity will be posted. I give an example using the introduction of a new column from an existing Facebook page to reach a fresh audience. Will it be released once a week throughout the year and, and most notably, will you still have time to write the column? Take the time to prepare everything before announcing then having to stop a great content trend, developing dissatisfaction for your members.
Also think about the visuals to orchestrate, including the images for the holidays, Halloween and Christmas, to produce all this content in only one shot. When using a graphic design service, plan for the long term by designing several visuals at once rather than one by one each month.
For this weblog, I create the annual visuals myself. Since I publish 12 virtual mags and 12 articles a year, and only manage this blog a few hours a week, I must plan tasks in advance and regroup every production to fit in with my schedule. I establish the mag images for every monthly post, whose topics were determined beforehand (what is called a content direction plan that is put in a document named a Media Kit to promote advertising services) and I took the opportunity to size these images of the dimension of social posts, also making sure to have a promotional visual for each article, programmed in the CMS of my website. Finally, since my social posts are scheduled to be shared when an essay is published, I only have one hour of writing left to do per weekday and a few additional posts that I keep for pleasure on the socials and voila, the management of the composition and the constant publication of this blog is set for the year, Articles are automatically shared on social media when published.
View Your Enterprise Services and Identify Your Service Settings
In the setting of your account when starting to fill the information to open a new page, for restaurant entrepreneurs, for example, Facebook allows displaying services, with a menu option, shop items and more. It’s good to use this service listings, helping with the indexing of your business page on the Facebook platform.
On the settings side of your business page, we can also choose business categories, also related to the indexing of your page. Categories will increase your chances of being found in searches, especially if your business name isn’t directly associated with your job title. For example, if your business is called Chez Laurent, not everyone will know that it’s a garage or a café, so you will miss opportunities without the assistance of categories and services. I would never, in my life, had typed Laurent to find the closest garage in town.
It’s now also possible, in this section of the settings, to mention if your business or office is in a shopping mall and options for home workers who don’t want to publish their physical address, which was a bummer for a lot of users before. These details will also meet the criteria of nearby business researchers to help find your page.
Fill in All the Possibilities for Displaying Company Accounts
Yes, search tools now show social media pages and their content in their results. This is how you should take advantage of it and fill all the display spaces on social networks.
Your profile picture and banner image should be with texts featuring your basic business information and relevant links to direct readers to your current site or promotion. Your hours of operation and contact information should be up-to-date, and website URLs and email should be functional.
We must remember that more than half of the visitors on the average website and social media use their phone, opening the small images to see the profile and banner pictures, thus the opportunity to pop a selling text.
Also, remember this detail when creating your visuals if you need to put wording on the images. Consider testing them to make sure your text will be large enough to be readable on mobile. I regularly send myself private posts with campaign visuals that I check with my mobile, especially the posts for a promotional budget promo with Meta.
The First Publication of Your New Account
The famous welcome message on a new page, which will often be pinned to the top of posts for the first few weeks, is important. It usually includes the image with the logo and slogan and a message of presentation of the business and a link to your website if it already exists. Don’t forget to include your keywords, hashtags and slogans.
The message should be addressed to both local and national visitors, so it should be written in general, without dates, unless you will remember to change the dates and content once the day arrives.
You can also explain in your next post the direction of the page content if you find that your first post is too long.
The number of publications per week
The pace of your posts is different for every business. Communications agencies and media outlets tend to publish several times a week, other production and manufacturing companies will need only one publication per week. The important thing is to stay constant, so visitors see the activity of the media and hopefully subscribe to your page and site. Also, regular posts show that you respect your audience and your followers, and this meets Facebook’s requirements in the proper use of the platform, a good performer, if we can explain it that way. However, having a good performance doesn’t just mean publishing, you also must participate.
An active account must include at least one post per 7–10 days and be proactive in liking, commenting, and participating in external content. So, posting 30 posts in 3 months and not posting anything for the next 2 months won’t help your performance.
Having a good performance in the platform will allow you to be actively seen by your followers too, as your content and page represent what Facebook wants to present to its followers.
Poor performance will require to restart your good habits of activity, to win back the good performer little heart of Facebook. That’s why your participation rate, unless you set a budget to reach all your subscribers, will take a few weeks to get back to a good performance. It’s explained briefly, but I’ll leave the Facebook Business guide link at the end of the article for more details.
Advertising
Publishing Scheduling with Meta Business Suite
Of course, one of the most popular platforms now offers the possibility to schedule posts in advance, because managers also have the right to sleep and have a life outside their jobs, right?
The Meta programming tool is practical and allows publishing on Instagram, create Stories (published on Facebook and Instagram) and Reels, the video trends since the spectacular arrival of TiK ToK. Although a 30-day limit in the publication scheduling tool is a low point, it’s possible to use other tools to achieve long-term publication scheduling.
For this blog, besides automatic shares when a new post is published, I use Meta BS to schedule daily announcements and promotions and holiday posts, because I also want to celebrate myself and not be in front of the computer or on my mobile. However, don’t take too much time off, as on social media, holiday periods are often the most profitable in several areas, with e-commerce remaining open 24/7. Don’t leave these periods of opportunities without content on your social media and instead take advantage of them to pin your best offers, your followers mostly follow you for this action, you know.
With a few posts and a few followers, the Meta BS tool will show you the highlights for your next posts, spotting the periods your followers are likely to read posts based on their usage habits. This information is valuable to know, especially for your first few months of managing your account, where there are few tools to measure the progress of a project whose sales or physical traffic is hardly measurable when the product isn’t on sale.
We should also consider looking at the performance statistics of our publications in the data options and adjusting our editorial staff accordingly.
My advice is to avoid a hasty decision when content doesn’t seem to take off yet, in terms of popularity. Of course, allow at least a good trial time of several weeks before drawing conclusions and destroying the texts of your unpopular column; Maybe it’s the visual that’s missing from your campaign. Be sure to read the next point: pre-release testing.
Test Your Content Before Publishing
How can we avoid publication blunders, typos in texts, links that lead to an error page, visuals with texts that are too small and loss because of erroneous campaigns not properly verified? Here’s my trick: try your publications internally and ask your colleagues to check it out.
This is also my advice for topics that you aren’t sure about, ask your colleagues and even go outside your department to get other opinions, if confidentiality allows it.
To test, you can also post a private message to yourself from your personal Facebook account to test the result of your post before publishing it on the company page. This is what I often do to check the quality of my visuals on the small screen, especially for images that will be in the home banner, so that text isn’t hidden by the location of the profile picture of the platform, for example.
To learn more about using Facebook and Meta, I suggest Meta’s free Blueprint courses.
Conclusion
Ah, the publishing scheduling tools so dreamed up by the first generation of webmasters and social media writers/publishers.
You know that in the early years of Facebook, the people who managed social didn’t have an official name or title in companies? You’d be surprised at the title of the signature of several marketers from the 2000s! Some were in the technical departments, others sat squarely with the accountants in the finance department. Time and technology fly by, don’t they? And that’s fine.
I conclude this article by inviting you to read part 1 of the reports and remember to always leave a redirect or subscribe link in your posts. Always think like marketers by giving a follow-up to your reader who now has your attention. Thus, I just subtly did so by redirecting you to another article on the same topic in this conclusion. It’s as simple as that, always a link and if possible, one more link too.
Thank you,
Jeff
Source: Facebook Business and Best Practices for Posting to Your Facebook Page for the First Time.
Images credit: banner image from pexels.com.
Your Socials are watching - The Serie
Your Social are watching - Part 1 - The business social media
Your socials are watching - Part 2 - The Company’s first Social Media
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I edit the content of existing sites via CMS in addition to creating sites with WordPress and Squarespace. I have been producing website content as a webmaster since 1998.
I help companies get their first website up and I improve the performance of existing sites.
Yes, I’m Mr. Analytics and my reaction time to new digital marketing is daily, which allows my clients to have optional and trend-cutting tools.
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