I'm in the beginning stages of planning a small business and I'm wonder about setting up an account for business promotion / market place buying & selling of products.
As the title suggests, Do any of you dorks have a business Facebook account? I don't do facebook, for personal things. If you would, please give me some advise on setting up an account for the sole purpose of business interactions.
I do, but I don't utilize it. I am absolutely horrible for self promotion and marketing.
I did. Well, technically I still do, though I shut the business down years ago.
I also do not use FB for personal stuff and was very frustrated to find that a personal FB account is required to act as administrator for the business page. The business page cannot be a standalone FB account.
It was a reasonably effective way to communicate with customers, but still a headache, mostly due to the complexity of making it do what you want it to do and trying to manage the invasiveness of FB into your life.
We have one but the wife unit runs it.
I can tell you that they seem to change the algorithm very frequently so as soon as you figure out how to get traffic, something changes.
They claim it all gets better with a paid account but I can't see the value in it.
Plan your posts about 3-5 days in advance if you're going to be at an event because it seems to take that long for Facebook to get the posts out to people.
In short, it sucks balls but everyone uses it because there's no way to reach as many people without spending money.
All of the above are true. Set up a personal page, do whatever or near-nothing with it, use it to get the biz page up and running, and if you put a post up that you think it particularly cool, go ahead and "boost" it with not very much dough. I might do that once a month or so and it seems to spread the word pretty well.
I have my instagram linked to my facebook...I prefer IG and whatever I post there goes to FB automatically.
In the distant past I did some ad buys for a specific product and it worked well enough. (FB)
Now it seems I try to boost a post and give them $$$ but the ads won't 'reach',and I'm not charged.
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong there.
Lately I keep a rotation of ads on Marketplace and just renew every week. It's free. it's linked to my personal and not business account, but it brings in work and customers. I just put my business name and info in the ads. Sort of a guerrilla marketing technique.
https://www.facebook.com/rlcweldfab/
https://www.instagram.com/rlcweldfab/
I've just realized something that was a real obstacle to me is that I wasn't already in the habit of using social media. Facebook, et al, are geared for extroverts who live their lives in the open. To some degree, that's going to be your customer base. As someone who lives a fairly private life, doesn't trust FB, and doesn't tend to share a lot, especially via the internet, it was not easy for me to engage with customers on a fairly continual basis. But that constant engagement, the regular posting of updates, the promotion (including expected discounts and other special events) is exactly what (my) customers wanted and expected.
TL;DR: You may be an introvert, and this may force you to pretend that you are an extrovert, which is incredibly taxing.
We do and it sucks
I'm one of two Public Relations officers for my local Star Wars group (501st Legion is international, local is Ohio Garrison). I got added to our business account last May, including the Instagram account. I do very much appreciate the ability to schedule future posts.
Me and the other guy split the week - I have M -T -W and he has T - F - Sun (we don't normally post on Saturdays). I really love being able to schedule all of mine on Sunday, we post to a group on regular FB called Ohio Garrison Dept of Propaganda, the CO & a few others can review it for mistakes/problems and if nothing bad I schedule it with the Business Suite.
It looks like there's more to it if we wanted to dive deeper, but that's all we use it for. (I manually do Instagram because it tends to berkeley up the cropping with multiple images.)
I set one up and then never updated it. It's on the list of things to do but we have been so busy I don't necessarily need the additional advertisement so it keeps getting pushed down the list.
I have one, occasionally put up a picture or respond to a PM on it but dead otherwise. Pushing $ into adverts is a black hole and I've never come out on top from the experiments I've run.
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