Offering Up the Best Advice for Using Facebook Offers to Grow Your Business

Is your business looking for a new way to drive sales?  Does your business have a physical location?  If you answered yes to both questions, then you need to take a good, long look at Facebook Offers.

Forgotten Friend

Facebook Offers are one of the most underutilised tools for businesses with physical locations looking to see an actionable result from their social media marketing.  We’re not sure why?  Maybe local businesses confuse them with Boosted Posts and Facebook Ads, or maybe brands just don’t understand this free social marketing tool.  Either way, we’re going to share some tips to get you started.

Clearing Up the Confusion

One of the biggest misconceptions about offers on Facebook is that they cost you – the business – a fee to create and share with your fans.  Like status updates, Facebook offers are free.  However, also like your page posts, you will not reach all of social network fans with a free offer.

Pay to Play?

Should your business pay to promote their Facebook Offers?  That depends on a variety of factors – one of which is if you want to reach a wider social media audience than just your fans alone.  Our advice would be to start off sharing a few offers without spending any money.  Perform some testing with content, types of offerings, images, etc., and then set aside a budget for future offers.

Image is Everything

Okay, image may not be everything, but an eye-catching image is essential for your offer.  Understanding Facebook Ad images best practices is a good place to start before choosing an image to use in your offer.  Whatever you do choose, make sure it is reflective of what is being offered as social network users don’t like smoke and mirrors.

Hidden Gem

Do you want to share an offer to a select group of your social marketing audience without broadcasting it to your entire Facebook fanbase?  Use the option to create an unpublished Offers Page Post.  This will keep your offer out of your Facebook for business page’s timeline and only show up to those you choose to target.

Last Not Least

A few other important items to remember include writing a compelling headline, creating offer terms that are clear, concise and easy to understand, and making your offer easy to redeem.  You will also want to make your offer worthwhile to your customer as they must physically come to your location to redeem it.  Finally, set an expiration date to create a sense of urgency and also set up reminders which will notify people just before an offer is due to expire.

Do you use Facebook offers successfully?  Please share your tips and experience in the comments below.