Don’t be Casual About Your Facebook Approach

You probably already know that Facebook is something businesses should be engaging with, especially if you’re a regular reader of this blog. But the problem for many businesses is that they don’t quite take it seriously enough. They fall for a lot of misconceptions about Facebook and social media in general, which means that they end up making a lot of mistakes in their strategy. This means that they end up not accessing the full potential of the Internet’s third most visited website.

Yes, you do need to repeat those six words to yourself: the Internet’s third most visited website. (Yes, it was the most visited website for quite some time, but it’s been overtaken by Google and YouTube in the last few months. Sorry, Mark!) With close to 2 billion users who are active on a monthly basis, however, it’s still the platform that has the most active users.

And yet it seems that a lot of business still aren’t taking Facebook very seriously. They imagine social media to be such a casual, even innocuous thing. Despite such heavy and widespread use, businesses seem to think that the people who use social media don’t pay much attention to anything on it outside of things that reflect directly on them. This means that these businesses end up wasting a lot of potential – because Facebook users tend to take what they see on the site very seriously indeed. (Often to their detriment, as we’ve seen with the just-ever-so-slightly-overstated modern problem of “fake news”.)

This sort of flippancy about the success of their Facebook pages among businesses needs to end. A business owner, for example, may not think that there not being too many likes on their Facebook business page is that big a deal. And, granted, Facebook likes aren’t everything.

But don’t assume it’s because users don’t tend to like – or, in other words, follow – business accounts. Because people actually do tend to give businesses a like if they’re interested in keeping up with them. And the healthier your Facebook page looks in terms of content and like count affects the likelihood that you’ll acquire more popularity. This is why you may want to increase social media advertising, or buy Facebook likes, or hire professional content creators and community managers.

Likewise, because of this overly-casual approach, businesses may make the mistake of not really engaging with people on social media. For a few years now, successful businesses have realized that real engagement on social media – talking to people, liking things, sharing the content of other creators – isn’t just something that individual users do. It’s something that businesses can do with those users, in order to increase the popularity of their brand.

What’s more is that most people will find out about your business after performing a search on Google. While Facebook isn’t the most visited website in the world, using it correctly does increase the visibility of your business on the website that is! Search for a business on Google and you’ll find their Facebook page on the first page of results.

So stop underestimating Facebook – and start being more serious in your approach to it.