Yesterday I was doing cold calls to different businesses that I thought would be a good fit for Ghostit services when one of the responses from a receptionist caught me off guard.
Here's how the call went:
Me: Hi there, I was wondering if I could speak with the person in charge of your marketing efforts. I Had trouble finding you on Facebook and wanted to know who runs your marketing and helps your businesses rank in Google search.
Receptionist: Oh we don't have a Facebook page.
Me: Oh, why not?
Receptionist: Why do we need one?
Me: Having a Facebook page helps you gain visibility online and will help you with drive more business and increase your brand awareness?
Receptionist: Oh I don’t know about all that. Ill transfer you though.
Me: ???????
Keep in mind this was an accounting firm but the mistake was mine. I was so entrenched in what Ghostit does I thought that everyone knew they needed a Facebook page, and just didn’t have the time or the means to post consistently.
So for this blog, I want to go over two things:
- Do you need social profiles
- What is working for Ghostit in terms of social efforts?
The reason why I think accounting is such a great example here is that I consider it falling under the category of a “boring” business. Necessary, but boring. So my thinking is if you can drive qualified website traffic from a social media accounting profile, you can drive traffic to any small business.
One of the many great things about Facebook is that it gives you awesome data, especially with regard to targeting. So as a small business, Facebook has given you an audience sniper rifle and all you have to do is pull the trigger. Facebook has made their audience targeting so granular that you can filter based on interests, marital status, job description and so on. So if your perfect customer is a CEO or business owner with a lot of money and you are an accounting firm, it would make sense to target business owners and CEO's around tax time.
The platform also has the largest user base in the world with over 2 billion users. And as small business owners, there’s a very good chance you’ll be able to reach and connect with your target audience through it.
If you don't already have a Facebook page here are some tips to help you get started.
Facebook Starter Tips
1) Make sure you have a nice banner image. Facebook is very visual.
2) Include a relevant description. You want your audience to know exactly who you are and what you do when they get to your profile.
3) Make sure you have proper website links. I have so many profiles that say click here to learn more and it is a dead link.
4) Set up a consistent post schedule. Nothing looks worse than landing on a Business page and seeing their last post was August 2014. It makes your business look like you don't pay attention to details. Either delete the profile or try and keep it up to date.
By following a basic posting schedule you can drive engaged traffic back to your website, allowing you to convert more customers. It's amazing what consistency can do for your business.
Your Facebook page can also act as a platform to answer potential client questions. Answering these questions in a public or private platform will build trust and credibility with your core audience. If people trust you they will buy from you.
Providing answers to questions like: “What do I need to do before I bring my taxes in?” and “Should I know anything basic about taxes? I am planning on starting a small business” are things that your potential audience would want to know.
Ultimately, a Facebook page will drive traffic to your website, build trust with your core and potential customer base, and provide you with an outlet to talk about important items that you think your audience should know about.
If you think you can post consistently by yourself here are some tools to help you:
- Hootsuite: Social scheduling and monitoring tool.
- Buffer: Social scheduling tool ← I'll be honest I think Buffer is a much better product.
- Canva: for designs if you are feeling fancy.
If you want to post to Facebook but don’t want to sit there and write all your posts, here are a few things you can do:
- Upwork: Hire your own freelancer but you should have an idea of a strategy and/or an editorial calendar. Here are some tips to hire from Upwork
- Ghostit: We would be remiss not to mention ourselves. Ghostit automates the whole process from writing to posting. You can learn more on our home page.
A quick side note: I have also heard “Oh we are too busy and don’t need more business” when I am making some cold calls. I don’t believe in this response. No matter how busy you are as a small business you should always care about establishing more credibility with your customers.
Here's yet another argument as to whether or not you need social profiles.
Now let's look at what is working for Ghostit.
I try and check our analytics almost daily to see where we can improve and I am always interested in seeing things that I did not expect. None of these posts are boosted and when I pulled these numbers we were around 200 likes on Facebook which shows you don’t need a massive following to get solid engagement.
People are tending to respond really well to “meet the founders” type posts where Rahul and I show our faces. The post shown below aimed to get traffic to a blog post we published on our website about how Ghostit as a company got started. You can read the blog here.
This was by far our best social post. It reached over 2,300 people just from organic shares and exposure.
People also responded really well to our new hire post in terms of engagement.
Here's what surprised me though. I thought that because our social engagement on the founder story was so high that the blog post would be the most viewed on our website but it was only accounting for 1.20% of our total unique traffic.
Compare that to our newest blog post on "Why Small Scale Businesses Need Content Marketing" which had a much lower social engagement (200ish people reach) but accounting for 6.89% of our total unique traffic.
Because we started off as such a scrappy startup and fully bootstrapped, we spent all our time fully focused on making our clients happy which meant our own content efforts didn't really take off until August 2017.
What is the takeaway from all of this? You should have social profiles and blog posts.
Make sure you have engaging social posts both showing what's going on with your business and informational topics.
Even if you are a small business like an accounting firm, you can bring a lot of value to the table by writing blog posts that answer your customer's questions and posting them to social media.
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