How do you decide where to spend your time on Facebook? If you are utilizing Facebook, you automatically have a profile. If you have a business, it’s likely that you also utilize a page &/or a group. Majority of people prefer groups over pages but we’re going to chat through why you should consider having both.
So like I mentioned, if you’re on Facebook, you automatically have that profile. A lot of times people refer to their profile as their page so before we dive in, I want to define each of them for you & then I’ll so give you analogies for each, so you know what to say when you’re talking about where you spend your time on Facebook. As we go through, I’m going to refer to each one as a part of your house. This will help you understand the levels of exposure, and what you should post on each one.
Your Facebook Profile
So let’s start with your profile. Why do people open Facebook to begin with? They want to see what their friends and family are doing, they want to be entertained, they want to be educated but what they necessarily don’t open the app for is be sold to. So keeping this in mind your profile should be 80 to 90% about you. Think about your profile as the inside of your house. Who do you let inside? Majority the time it’s friends and family. Now it’s a really good idea to have your profile public that way people can find you and can see what you’re about. Now that doesn’t mean everything is public. If you’re going to share some thing personal, maybe your kids or something more private, you can change the privacy settings of each specific post. You get to choose the level of exposure for that post while everything else remains public.
Now the other 10 to 20% of your posts can be about your business. Think of it this way… your friends are scrolling through Facebook, they don’t want to see ads & your business posts are like commercials on the TV, so if your friends are scrolling and all they see are commercials from you… what do you normally do with commercials skip or change the channel, but on Facebook what could happen is they could unfollow or unfriend you.
Optimizing Your Profile
Now, let’s talk about optimizing your profile. Your profile picture should be a picture of YOU, and it should be of you SMILING! If you have a profile picture of your entire family or maybe it’s a picture of your dog or you and all your friends; whenever I get a friend request from somebody, I have no idea who is who in the picture sending the friend request. So bottom line make sure your profile picture is a picture of you; shoulders up, smiling. Now if you’re saying Kimberly… I wanna showcase my family, or I love my dog. Absolutely, me too… your cover photo is where they can go.
Next up is your bio. A piece of advice I’ve heard before about your bio is put here either what people are going to see if they keep scrolling or what are some things you can talk about for hours and never get tired. Keep in mind, it’s only 100 characters long & while links are clickable here, I wouldn’t put a link there. Put your link where the links go & save that space for your actual bio.
Next step are your personal details. This is where you can list your work history any links you have, your education, where you’ve lived. But what I want to point out here is, you can hide some of these things. Sometimes I go to profiles and they have every place they’ve lived. They have all of their past jobs listed & it takes up the entire screen. So only list your current jobs & the things that you absolutely want seen in your details.
Now this is a great segue into your page. I see so many people put their companies page in their work history, so what happens when someone goes to your profile & they say “oh my gosh I’ve been looking for this consultant for forever and I haven’t been able to find somebody and this person is it!” They click on that business page & where do they go? Not to you. They go to the company. So if you see any value or advantage of having a page, this is it… put it in your employment history.
Your Facebook Page
In regards to the house analogy your page is your front yard so if you had a flag up or a sign that said “hey, this is my business!” anyone driving by can see that sign. You guys know I talk about Google My Business a lot & how it helps me get local leads so I want you to think about your page as like Google My Business on Facebook. A page is 100% public which means that it’s also searchable by Google. Now the main drawback with a page is that the reach is dismal in the beginning… especially if you aren’t consistent with it… like, less than 5% reach. Your page is where you can share 100% your business every single day… multiple times a day if you wanted to because it’s your business.
A page also allows the ability to put money behind a post in the form of an ad. Now this is not something I recommend doing if you aren’t consistent with your page if you aren’t utilizing your page, & if you don’t understand the ads process. The one piece of advice I can give you with as is if you see that little boost button, do not click it. If you’re going to give money to Facebook, be sure to invest in a course to understand how it works & how to utilize the Ad Manager instead of boosting. You can also start a shop with a page so you can tag products in your posts but ensure that you stay in compliance if you go that route. Another plus is insights on which posts are doing well. Now, if you aren’t using Google My Business, pages also allows you to collect reviews so if you do not create a page for anything else, other than putting it in your bio, is to have a place to collect reviews.
Your Facebook Group
And last, let’s talk about groups. Now you can either create your group from your profile or you can create a group off of your page. It doesn’t matter how it starts. Personally, I created mine off of my profile then I connected my page. Think about your group as your back yard & you have a party going on every single day. Only those you allow & extend the invite to will be able to get in. Your group, similar to your page, is a place where you can post 100% about your business, the people who are in your group excepted the terms whenever they said yes I want to be in your group that they were signing up to see your post about your specific business.
Some people call this their VIP group; I like to call mine a customer support group, but this is where you can share what’s going on in your business first. Another great thing about groups is you get to choose the level of visibility. You can either have a public group that anyone can find & join, a private visible group so when someone does search for your company or the name of your space, your group pops up but they won’t see any of the post, or you can have a private hidden group so no one can find it & it would be invite only.
Another great thing about groups I love is all of the organizational tools you can utilize. If you have specific themes you share in your group, turn those into guides. or maybe specific product categories can each be a guide. You also have the ability to create albums, so maybe if you have specific collections, you can have an album per collection. There are also topics which are the same things as hashtags. Another piece I love is the pinned post or featured post aspect. If you have something important you want your members to know about, you can send it to the top so it’s always there, & anytime you add a featured post people get a notification. Like pages, you can also see insights into which posts or types of content are doing well so you can double down on those.
Now there are a TON of other things you can do with all three but I wanted to keep this as general as possible. So just a recap, your profile should remain as personal as possible. Your page is where your business lives, and your group is where your customers hang out. I’d love it if you would share how you use your profile, your page and your group down below in the comments and if you have any questions, let me know.
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