Mila Joshua Yona
Facebook is a great tool to boost your small businesses. It provides a platform where you can sell your products and services and also connect with existing and prospective customers on a more personal level.
While Facebook marketing may seem a great way for South Sudanese businesses to grow their sales and revenues, many businesses that are leveraging this giant social network are using it the wrong way.
As with any other sales medium, Facebook marketing also has its pros and cons.
Understanding those pros and cons can help small businesses maximize their returns and improve customer experience or it could leave their businesses crippled.
Consider the Facebook marketing mistakes that small businesses make in South Sudan below
1. Using Personal Profiles Instead Of Facebook Pages
This is a mistake almost all south Sudanese businesses are making. They are not able to differentiate between a Facebook page and a personal Facebook account.
If you own a business and wish to promote it on Facebook, the best way is to create a Facebook page. This is because your personal profile account is never meant for business purposes.
Facebook could easily disable your personal profile account if the moderators detect that you use your personal account for business.
While personal profile accounts can be good for staying connected with friends and family, they do come with their own set of limitations that only a Facebook page can surpass.
For instance, you can only have access to the Facebook Insight tool, run paid Facebook advertisements, surveys, and contests on a Facebook page.
2. Aggressive Spam Marketing
Spam is cancerous. Some businesses think that Facebook marketing is all about sharing their links with everyone on Facebook, like or inviting friends to follow their Facebook page, sharing the same old boring articles about why their company is the best, or massively posting their company products to Facebook groups.
Such Spam marketing will only affect your credibility, make people unfollow your Facebook page and then block you eventually downgrading your business reputation.
Facebook marketing ought to be done in a professional and calm manner, using paid Facebook ads that can go for as low as only $1 per day.
3. Keeping Outdated Facebook Pages
Nobody really cares about a website, newspaper brand, blog, or even social media page that is not updated regularly. When people decide to like or follow your Facebook page, it is because there is something about it that either inspires them, educates them, entertains them, adds value to their lives, or motivates them to make a purchase.
Your page fans want to return to your page and find something new all the time (new posts, images, or videos). If you do not constantly update your Facebook page, your prospective clients will get tired of visiting and finding the same old content on your page all the time and eventually unfollow it and will totally forget about your brand.
In the event of any of the above negative outcomes, your marketing efforts will be rendered useless.
4. Not Responding to Enquiries And Comments
Normally, when a prospective customer visits your Facebook page and picks interest in a product or service your business is offering, they comment or inbox your page with high hopes of getting quick feedback.
If your responses are quick and timely, you can boost your post engagement and turn your business prospects into buying customers. But, if you always take ages to reply back, you will always lose your prospects to your competitors.
You should prioritize customer support in your business. Show your customers that you care about them by finding out what they actually need or want from your business and responding to their queries with satisfactory answers.
5. Posting Personal Content On Business Page
Your Facebook page is a business page which makes it a separate legal entity. The business page should strictly have content related to your business.
If you have the desire to post a photo of your daughter or son, you should do it on your personal account instead. It’s not healthy mixing business with personal life.
6. Boring Facebook Page
The key to a successful marketing strategy is regularly posting interesting and engaging content on your Facebook business page. The content should not be repeated and very wordy.
Small businesses often post official statements for their companies, product images with prices, and other serious stuff that is not even close to something called fun
However, your business page visitors also want to learn facts, solve puzzles, riddles, watch your business team out, see behind the scenes of your business operations, and experience all the thrilling activities with you.
If you can give your customers and prospects a different overview every time they visit your page, you can be certain that they will keep coming back.
7. Not setting Up the Business Page Fully
A lot of businesses in South Sudan have Facebook pages with incomplete information. When you visit them, you find little to no information on the ‘About’ Section, no action buttons, contact information, profile picture, or cover photo.
Setting up your business page helps you put your business on the right trajectory to create a trusted brand that people won’t find excuses as to why they won’t buy from you.
8. Improper Facebook Ad Setup
Have you ever promoted a well-performing Facebook ad campaign? If not then your Facebook Ad Campaign setup is totally wrong and that’s what is affecting most of the small businesses in South Sudan.
They set up Facebook ad campaigns targeting the whole of South Sudan with all demographic features selected which never yield any results.
Take a case study: If you own an e-commerce store, the best way to promote your store would be to run Facebook ad campaigns targeting users in Juba since it’s a major location with a high prospect status and conversion rates.
The next step would be targeting people with interest in e-commerce products then select the age group of people likely to buy your products (e.g. 24-45 years of age).
9. Having no Social Media Manager
A lot of businesses don’t value the essence of a social media manager. They think they can save more if they single-handed run their own Facebook Business Page which is a very wrong mentality.
If you’re no expert at social media marketing, you need to hire a professional social media manager to handle your business page. I promise you, it’s so rewarding.
All you need to do is set a daily budget for promotion.
10. Not Collecting Emails from Clients
The other mistake that businesses in South Sudan make is not collecting emails from their clients and that costs them a great deal since they can’t run a robust and successful email marketing campaign.
With your customers’ email data, you can follow up on them directly via mail, share what exclusive deals, tips, and valuable services you’re offering with them, and eventually close sales in the process.
Therefore ensure that you collect your customers’ email before processing any order for your business on Facebook.
11. Not Investing On Page Promotion
In order to increase your business’s Facebook page visibility and reach more people, you have to ultimately pay for it.
As much as your content can do the job for you, it’s not enough to promote newsworthy, informative business posts and increase the page followers, likes, or shares.
Therefore you have to have a daily budget for promotion via Facebook targeted ads and sponsored posts which all cost money.
Convinced!
The Facebook business page is a digital representation of your business on Facebook and should be treated as such.
Go back to the drawing board and come up with a clear social media strategy and desist from making stupid mistakes on Facebook that can hurt your business in the long run.
If you find the task to be daunting, please hire a social media expert to help you.
