If you are a local business owner, you can effectively use Facebook to promote your services and products locally as well as catering to a global clientele. The best part of it is that most of this promotion would be free of cost. There are paid advertisements of course, but Facebook is still largely free to use, this is in fact one of the key strategies the Facebook brand is using to win visitor trust. Although population wise, as I am sure you have heard Facebook is already the 3rd most populated country in the world after China and India, it has more than 901 million active users, yet there are many netizens who have haven’t registered yet. Everyone on the net has at least heard about Facebook, even my Grannie has heard of Facebook and she has never even touched a computer or smartphone.
With this huge user base, you can expect clients from any corner of the world to connect with you through your page, if you manage and promote it properly. If you are more interested in local clients, then you can connect with only them. All you have to do is target your page towards the community’s local to you.
You Need to Start By Creating A Page
Once you create the page, you can promote it by organic internal SEO or paid advertisements. For organic SEO, you begin by using a relevant local page title. The page title is very, very important. It should be catchy, attractive, and expressive. Once you select the category and think up a good page title, your work is already half done. Now, all you have to do is to let locals know that you have a Facebook page. Make sure you create a page and not a group; this is the mistake many small businesses make. Amongst other reasons for this a group is not indexable by search engines, a page is.
Invite Locals
You might already have a considerable number of local friends or customers on your friend list before you create your page. These contacts should come in handy because you can invite them to like your page, the more likes a page has the higher it will show on a Facebook search, although you probably have quite low competition locally anyway.
Make More Local Admins
Make more people administrators on your page, you should do this because every admin can send friend requests to people on his/her friend list, the scope for more local invites increases. However, you have got to trust your administrators and too many cooks can well…ruin the broth.
Maintain Your Website And Page
Do you have a website for your local business? It is not essential but if you do have a website connect your page with it, link the two together. Also ask visitors to your brick and mortar store to visit your Facebook page give them some incentive like discounts, competitions and promotional offers. Make these offers available for your Facebook fans only. Try to use Facebook as your business profile and like similar local businesses on the network.
Post submitted by Mark from pandaseo.co.uk, Mark is a local seo and online marketing specialist, he can help with on-site SEO, white hat link building, Facebook, Twitter marketing and web design services.
An entreprenuer with 8 years online marketing and SEO experience, Mark owns a number of affiliate sites and offers his services as a freelance SEO
