How to Grow Your Business on Facebook (with & without ads)

Many businesses rely on Facebook for easy, low cost digital marketing however it's harder and harder to reach people on Facebook with users spending time elsewhere on other social apps and with Facebook getting more and more spam content on the site - so what can you do?

Organic posting

Note: 'organic' simply refers to any unpaid (non-ad) social media activity.

The key to growing your business on social media is constantly reaching new people, this is easier said than done. The reality is that only a small percent of your page followers see each of your posts. Posting more often doesn't necessarily mean you're reaching a greater number of people.

If you're posting frequently you want to ensure you have a diverse range of content and aren't hard selling to your followers all of the time. Posts should aim to inspire, educate, entertain or otherwise provide some sort of value to your followers giving them a reason to care about your business.

Easy ways to reach more people are to join and share your business and posts in relevant Facebook groups. You can reach a large number of people without having a large following this way.  People are also always asking these groups for product and service recommendations giving you the opportunity to suggest your business. The more specific the group is to your industry or location the better!

Sharing posts with links in them is known to limit the organic reach of your post so even if your goal is to get people to your website, it's best not to add your website every single time - this is why you see a lot of news pages adding links in their comments instead of on their main post.

Paid advertising

What businesses need to grow is new customers, and when you're sharing to your page you're usually only ever reaching people who are already familiar with your business, probably friends, family and past customers.

If you're spending any amount of time or energy on posting regularly, running the occasional ad is a great way to increase the reach of your Facebook page and posts to help you get a better return on the time and effort you've put into creating content for your page.

Even boosting a post for just $10 can make a HUGE difference (such as taking a post from 78 impressions to over 8,500 impressions, a recent client example).

If you don't enjoy the process of planning and sharing social media content then ads can be the way to go to reach more people with less time and effort. 

However, boosting posts can be a waste of money if the post you're boosting is not a good first impression of your business and you don't select appropriate targeting.

Numbers wise, it's possible to have Facebook Ads running every day of the year for just $750 in ad spend. Not many other marketing platforms provide that level of consistency at such a relatively low cost. 

Important

You never want to be solely reliant on just one platform such as Facebook. Things go wrong and people lose access to their pages unfortunately. Always diversify your online presence and explore other options where applicable.

In summary...

To grow your business on Facebook you need to be consistently reaching new people, often easier said that done. Sharing your posts into relevant Facebook groups and boosting appropriate posts or running ads are some of the easiest and quickest ways to achieve this.