The secret to using Facebook or other social media to promote your micro-business lies in understanding why your customers use it. Facebook wasn’t invented to sell things, it was created as a tool for sharing and communicating. If you bear that in mind, you will be able to identify the value it can add for your micro-business. But miss that point and it will frustrate you and drain you of time.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid tool for selling. It can be, but it’s often better to view it as a tool for communicating and sharing, rather than expecting lots of sales.
Use it to post videos and pictures of your products, or introduce profiles of staff, or encourage reviews and comments so that you build up a community. Members of the community may go on to purchase from you or share it with other people they know, but don’t expect this to happen, use it as a tool for engagement.
If you have a product or service that lends itself well to conversation, sharing, group interactions, imagery or videos, set up a Facebook page for your micro-business and jump in. If it’s a product where you can encourage people to talk about how they’ve used it or to take pictures of it, even better. Encourage this on your page. You might even want to have a competition for the best use, or most bizarre place it can be seen, or most imaginative creation.
But this only works if it’s something that people can get genuinely interested in. Business-to-business products, for example, might not lend themselves well to marketing via Facebook. But anything that people use in connection with parties or anything to do with other people often does.
It can also work well with areas where people might need advice. So if you regularly get asked questions about how to do something, you could set up a forum via the Facebook page to encourage other people to respond (as well as yourself), so that you build a sense of community around your offering.
