I recently audited the social presence of a group of businesses within the travel industry. While the audit was specific to one sector it is a fair representation of many small to medium businesses who similarly use social media marketing to promote their services and grow their business.
My end goal was to determine who, within the group, was using social media marketing effectively to promote their products and services.
While some companies used multiple sites including Twitter and Instagram, Facebook was overall the primary social media platform used. That makes a lot of sense as Facebook is still the leading social platform plus recognised as the site that consumers use when making travel decisions.
Aside from vetting the overall content shared by the individual travel agencies, I needed to check how the business page looked from the perspective of a first-time visitor. For this, I looked for consistency in branding along with the kind of content shared and what the user might look for.
From that audit, I put together a list of things businesses had either overlooked or simply were not using to best advantage on their page. And I’ve followed up with an action tip and relevant examples to act as guidance for when you do your own Facebook page audit.
Call To Action Button
On your page you have a button that offers a variety of options to customers including Call, Email, Book and Sign Up. Many of the pages I looked at, had the setting at ‘Contact Us’ however, on clicking the button, the user is re-directed to the company’s website.
Now to my mind if you have a ‘Contact Us’ button on your Facebook page, the user will not want to be pushed through to a non-interactive website. I’m pretty certain it could tick them right off – as it would with me.
Action:
Go in to the edit button feature and choose the action you’d like your prospective customers to take when they find your Facebook page. Plus, make sure all the information is correct and relevant.
Facebook ‘About’ Information
If someone does hear about your company and want to check you out, it’s possible they will read the ‘About’ information on your Facebook page. Again, I found with many of the business pages I audited, this was not completed or had minimal information.
Action:
Go into your ‘About’ page and update. At the very minimum, you need to make sure the business address is in there, the map is correct, the button has been edited to how you want it plus all contact details are visible.
Facebook Page Logo
For many small businesses having a designer create a logo is often something that goes on the long finger. Many will have knocked up some kind of logo using Word and it works well enough for their letters and invoices. However, with social sites pushing you to upload logos in a jpeg or png format, some with no logo choose to use an image instead.
Problem is, the image is often a beach scene or similar with absolutely no branding whatsoever for the agency.
Another problem is not having the logo resized correctly. One company had a reasonably well designed logo that looked good on their website. It was built around two words. The first, the owners name and the other, the word travel e.g. XXXX Travel. It wasn’t a particularly long name but even so, without any resizing, their logo appears on Facebook as ‘ravel.’
And one more thing, while some did resize their logo, the text became so small the logo was nothing more than a blur in the Facebook newsfeed.
Action:
First thing I’m going to ask you to do is to go into your Facebook home page and look at some of the brands you follow and see what they’ve done to have an instantly recognisable logo for their social site.
As a logo is part of your brand identity, you could engage the services of a graphic designer. It’s no longer an expensive service plus when it’s done, the designer will have created your logo in a variety of different sizes to use in traditional as well as online marketing.
If you don’t want to go down that road but you have a little creative flair yourself then I urge you to check out Canva.com which has loads of templates to choose from.
I use Canva all the time and you’ll see why when you access the site. It’s fantastic tool for designing graphics plus easy to use.
And finally…
There were several other things I found in that audit that I could share here but they were content related. If you’d like to read a little more on that, click here. For now, having a Facebook business page, which looks professional, is a first step in gaining the confidence of any new user to your page. And that’s important if you want to move them down the buying funnel.
To your online success!
If you would like some help with your online marketing, get in touch and let’s talk
