Starting your business? Here's how you can use Facebook to grow

With a number of small businesses proliferating across the country, social media has emerged as a potent tool for startups to leverage its credibility to grow and expand. If done right your business can benefit a great deal from channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter etc. Slick and budget friendly, social media is the best way to reach your target audience, create awareness for your product, build engagement and generate brand advocacy.

But, first and foremost you need to define your purpose of being on a social media channel. Your business goals need to be aligned with your social media marketing to help you to monetise your marketing campaigns you run on these channels.

While, there are myriad social media channels to leverage, Facebook is the most common and user-friendly channel to help you convert users into loyal customers.

Being a real-time platform, Facebook can help small businesses create a loyal fanbase by creating repeat customers. However, a lot of small businesses are still clueless about the magnitude and reach of social media. If you as small business owner are looking to get more customers with minimum or no cost, Facebook is where you can get started. Here's how you can use it in 5 ways to grow your business:-

Content engagement- Content is king in any visual channel and it is a paramount when it comes to Social media especially Facebook where newsfeed is very competitive. You can generate high quality content to help you establish credibility and thought leadership amongst users. This in turn will help get traffic to your blog and drive user engagement thereby creating a buzz for your brand online. Create content around interesting topics on the industry you are in, useful data, product updates etc on your blog and backlink it to your website and facebook page to gain traffic and increase conversions eventually.

Live feeds- Social media means speed and real-time. You can stream live on Facebook to reach the right audience as it works wonders than a common post on your page. These live sessions are the best way to manage and build online reputation for your brand. Run catchy tickers and titles along with your posts to catch viewers' attention. You can stream behind the scenes experience to your viewers, promote events, give a sneak peak into your products or answer live questions about your products.

Run Contests- One of the most common practices these days is running contests on Facebook. It serves the dual purpose of creating brand awareness and attracting users to your product. These contests can be developed using applications that come handy albeit you are compliant with Facebook's terms and conditions.

Groups and Communities- Creating groups and communities on Facebook will help you reach the target user category where it can also drive peer to peer engagement amongst the group audience and help you generate qualified leads. Creating a Facebook group/community is a free channel with no cost per conversion and a very helpful tool to engage with users, increase your business's reach and impression and build an online community for your brand.

Paid ads- You can also pay Facebook to achieve your marketing objectives. Paid marketing channels such as display ads can help you grab user's attention and consideration for your product. Display ads are visually appealing and can push the user towards purchasing the product. You can also customize your user demography to target the right set of audience as paid ads enable you to give your specifics on who you want to target on Facebook.