Facebook and Google are the giants of online advertising for small businesses. Recently I attended a Facebook Community Boost event and joined hundreds of business owners in a small town in New Jersey to learn about how to use Facebook.
Facebook Community Boost is an initiative of Facebook to educate 1 million businesses in how better market their business using Facebook.
Sure, Facebook is educating customers who will buy billions of dollars of advertising, but we small businesses NEED and WANT easy to use and low cost solutions to drive customers to our businesses.
The all day event, opened with a keynote from Facebook executives and local elected officials. The best part was a panel discussion with Two Blind Brothers and Charleston Gourmet Burger.\
The panelists shared a few core insights in using Facebook:
- Start with a narrow audience. Don’t target “all women” – target women in a small town, who have certain demographics or interests. From there you can expand your market.
- Use your own lists. Take your email list, upload it to Facebook and begin to target messages to that list.
- Test your messaging. Spend $5 or $25 and test what advertising works.
There’s so much more to using Facebook but overall it’s a powerful platform to drive new business or strengthen your brand with existing customers.
After the morning sessions we broke into workshops. Some people were experienced and some people were new to Facebook. We learned how to create effective ads, we learned how to better use Instagram and more. Overall, it was a great experience and I was very glad I went. I met great people, learned quite a bit, and now have a better idea of how to position my businesses using Facebook.
