Small Businesses - Are You Making These Mistakes on Facebook?

There are more and more small businesses jumping onto the Facebook bandwagon, and while this isn't a bad thing, there are some things that you as a business owner need to think about before diving in head first and maybe wasting your valuable time simply because of little mistakes.

Facebook can bring you a lot of business and attention, but if you handle it wrong it can also be detrimental to your business's image. In order to prevent this, make sure that you are avoiding some of the most common mistakes businesses make on Facebook.

You Can't "Set It and Forget It"

While Facebook may seem like something you could set up and leave to its own devices, this is far from the truth. The whole point of Facebook is for people to connect and interact with each other. If a person is looking on Facebook for a business to work with, they expect to see interaction.

Some people get the idea in their mind that as long as they have a good product or service, visitors will find their page and "Like" it. This is a strange idea since you wouldn't expect to open a brick and mortar business and to have people loving you just because you're in business, so why should people love you simply because you have a Facebook page?

You need to take time to update your page, respond to messages, and reach out to touch prospects.

You Need to Keep Things Interesting

Another odd idea that some business owners get into their mind is that their product or service is so awesome that as long as people see it, the business will have a loyal following. So the business owner updates their page every Tuesday, responds to messages on Wednesday, and posts a special offer on Friday. They figure they are set and the "Likes" will just roll in.

This is wrong again since on top of being engaged with your audience, you have to shake things up. You need to surprise people occasionally. Update randomly, respond in a timely manner, and make different kinds of changes and additions to your page. This will keep people interested.

More Isn't Necessarily Better

Something else to avoid doing is automating your Facebook page updates. There are systems that can schedule updates, and you can also set up auto-updates from other social sites such as Twitter. But this can actually hurt your page in a few ways.

The main reason is that while your audience wants you to be engaging, they don't want to be inundated with updates from your page each day. This really goes for any social site - if more than a quarter of their page is taken up by your updates, they will hide you from your feed or stop following you. It is easy to get too many updates going out each day, especially if you are linking your marketing tools.

Learn About The Tools & Options Available

This is a big one since so many business owners consider themselves to be too busy to learn all the different tools and options that Facebook offers. You could be missing out on a lot of traffic if you ignore what is available to you on your page.

Take some time to learn the "ins and outs" of how your page functions and what you can do to make it as great as possible. Chances are you will start seeing a lot more return on your page than most of your competitors.

These mistakes generally overlap when businesses make them, so with a little planning you should be able to avoid them all. Remember that when it comes to using Facebook balance is key - you have to be engaged regularly, unpredictable, interesting, and not annoying. Yes, people are picky and your audience in high-maintenance, but this is the case in any business.

By taking the time and energy to set your page up properly and keep your audience happy, you will be ahead of 90% of your competition. Once you are seeing a positive response from those who visit your page, you will thank yourself.