Episode #076 Make the Best Use of Your Facebook Bookkeeping Business Page – hosted by Angie Martin

 

Make the Best Use of Your Facebook Bookkeeping Business Page – hosted by Angie Martin

 

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

business, bookkeepers, facebook, clients, offers, facebook page, people, template, bookkeeping, page, create, static content, stories, post, support, section, community, engagement, groups, actual

 

00:01

So the whole point of this podcast is that I wanted to go through and help you learn a couple ways that you can make your Facebook page work for you in your business a bit more, because it's always the number one question that people always ask me. And it's kind of hard to explain sometimes because everyone wants the exact information that suits them best. But until I know the ins and outs of your business, it's really hard to professionally say yes, this is what you do. So everything today I'm going to be talking about in a generalised sense, and if you want to have more of a specific, you know, recommendation, please feel free to always book in a time with me, we always offer 15 minute consults, and there's a lot that can get done in 15 minutes, so please feel free to book in a time with me, but let's go over some of these generalised, awesome tools that are book has available that you can use to really make the most out of the applications that they have worked so hard to offer us.

 

01:10

First, I've got it, basically to let you guys know, I've got it broken down into three different categories. The first category is just talking about static content. Now, for those of you who don't know what static content is, it's usually in reference to websites, but it definitely counts for actual social media and especially Facebook pages as well. So static content in the official definition, is any content that is that can be delivered to an end user without having to be generated, modified or processed. The information basically is something that you put up once, maybe refresh every six or Some months but it remains static so that people can go to it, look at it, refer to it and then move on. It's not a post, it's not an ongoing story or video that changes every day or every week or every month. This is static that you want to keep there for a long period of time. Kind of like your about page on your website or your contact us page on your website.

 

02:25

So in Facebook, there are actually static pages that you want to make sure you can perfect and have it there so that it can really be a lead generation source for your clients. So for you and for your clients. So the first thing I want to talk about is the actual about page in Facebook. This about page is actually so important because this is where a lot of the SEO comes from. So you really Want to make sure that you're spending that time to fill in everything on that Facebook page, and everything that you possibly can that directly relates to your overall mission statement and value proposition of your business.

 

03:16

You can get those in bits of information by doing a proper business plan. And we offer a proper business plan on the Savvy Facebook, on the Savvy Facebook page, and on the actual website itself. It takes about six hours to go through to do it properly. And as long as you do it properly, you can create a really solid base about your company, what you do for your clients, and a little bit about you as well. It's a really great way to make the most out of your business plan and the most out of your About Us page on your website and on your Facebook page. So on your Facebook page There are sections that are just for contacting your phone number your email, when you business was created, that actually takes that means a lot to a lot of viewers, I always look to see how long a business has been in business doesn't typically deter me if you're a brand new business to work with them, but I like knowing how long they have been in business. It's just something nice to know. So put in when you were established, put in all the information you possibly can

 

04:32

and make sure that you notice there's two spots to put your description. In the little description that Facebook offers. You want to make sure that you're putting your more value based description in that small bit. And then use your longer description section to do your about us from your website. And really going into your mission statement as to why Your business is amazing and how you can really help support your clients. By doing that, you're going to be able to really support them and really educate them as to what kind of bookkeeper you are, and what kind of clients that you want to deal with. If you want an example of this, please feel free to go through and look at the Off The Hook bookkeeping Facebook page because we do this on this page as well, just because it's always great to have a reference.

 

05:29

Now another item that is always static, and I actually should have mentioned it first because it is the most important aspect of having a bookkeeping business page on Facebook, and that is making sure you have the right template for your business. Now it's very easy to change your templates. What typically happens when you create a Facebook page is Google and Facebook automatically has a set template for you for any business. It doesn't allow you to do any variation, add anything different. It's just a template. So what it does, what Facebook offers is for you to go into your settings in your page settings section. And you can actually change up your template in your tabs. And I would highly suggest this for any bookkeeper because bookkeeping is a service based business.

 

06:25

So you want to make sure that you can really provide information on your service based offering. So there is an actual business template that says it's for services. So for bookkeepers, please always make sure that your Facebook page is in a service template. Why is this so important? Two main reasons. One, the service template allows for bookings to actually come through on your Facebook page, you're actually allowed to be able to book in with potential clients Which gives them the opportunity to become an actual lead on your Facebook page instead of having to go to your website, which is massive because it makes it much more instant and gives you more opportunity of closing a deal.

 

07:16

Second, it allows you to actually discuss in display the services that you provide. It's the same kind of concept that if someone is a ecommerce business or a product based business, they would be going for the template that offers the shopping template so that they can show their products just like a cafe will be using the cafe or restaurant template. You want to make sure you are on the service template so that you can go through and list every single product and service that you offer your clients. That way they can already learn as much about you and Since it's static content, the SEO will be able to pick up on other search engines to make sure that they see it as well. So again, it offers that dual SEO option that you can copy directly from your Facebook page, sorry, from your website, onto the Facebook page. And it just gives that extra way of insight and because you have your booking option on,

 

08:24

you can also have people going on looking at the service and then click to book in with you because of that service. It's a great tool and I highly suggest it's the first thing if you need to rejig your Facebook it's the first thing that you want to be doing because it makes such a difference when managing your business page.

 

08:47

Next, which is another static content that not many people know about and only certain applications can use is newsletter signups. This is a relatively new inclusion in Facebook. But as long as you have certain newsletter databases such as MailChimp, you can actually integrate MailChimp in Facebook so that you can have a tab that allows people to actually sign up for you, which is amazing. That way you are being able to transition people from being just contacts on your Facebook page, which if Facebook ever falls over, all of those contacts, information for you will disappear. So you want people to go onto your newsletter list so that you have them to be able to contact later on. It's really, really important and it's something to always remember that social media might not be around, it might fall over. So you want to make sure you can have that contact information later on. So that's a great little one.

 

09:56

One I did forget to mention about I started to talk about it and I got distracted by the amazing news of templates, that is tabs tabs is the navigating section that you see on your left side of your screen when you are on a Facebook page, anywhere an actual private or a business page in this includes the About Us the services, the products, the shopping, the community, all of that. There's actually ways that you can dictate what kind of tabs that you have in your Facebook page and it's in the same section where you pick your template that you want. So, in my professional opinion, this is the order that every service based business especially bookkeeping business should have. That is first and foremost, the homepage course.

 

10:51

Second is services.

 

10:54

Third is about us and then reviews and Then you can go on to depending on the kind of business that you have, you can then do either offers or you can do videos if you have videos, or you can do community if you have a community page or community involvement where people take you and everything, that's a great way of doing it. And then newsletters and then you can either turn off offers if you're not going to use offers don't have it on the page because it makes it look dirty, messy and it looks really bad when you have a tab but you don't have any information for it. So if you have don't have videos, take the video off. It's a very easy click to do take offers off, take jobs off, if you aren't looking for to hire someone on Facebook, take that top off. just rearrange it so it makes the best sense for your business but try and always have services About us in reviews first, because that is the most important thing that potential clients and even current clients are going to want to look at when they're on your Facebook page, it's the best way to get to know you instantly know if you are the right kind of bookkeeper for a potential client.

 

12:20

So, that is the static information that is available on Facebook. Next, I want to go into the more ongoing audience involvement that is available. Now the ongoing audience involvement isn't your daily posts or stories that you're doing. It's time and place engagement that, again, is almost static, it can always be there. And it's a way of creating extra engagement. So the best example of that is groups. And the savvy bookkeeper uses this quite a bit because we really focus on the community, which is why this podcast exists. Kay, Amy really wanted to be able to support you guys as much as possible in her community. Smart support the bookkeeping community in general. So she created the bookkeepers voice and not as what we like to focus on when we have in utilise our Facebook groups for the savvy bookkeeper.

 

13:28

In the past, we have created the I heart payroll, I heart bookkeeping, I hurt PandaDoc, all these different groups to really help support you guys. So that when you go to these groups, you know exactly what you can be able to talk about, communicate and engage with other people who are in the same boat as you. And like I mentioned in last episode, you can use groups as creating a client group where you put all of your clients in this group and add it as a educational base to really help improve your customer service in your, basically your support of your clients, and we do this ourselves, these podcasts that we do, we now stream live as we're doing them to one of our community Facebook groups, which is for our members only. It's an exclusive group. And it's a way of having people be able to learn and be more engaged with us as things are happening. It kind of takes the curtain away, and lets people know a bit more.

 

14:39

But what's happening in if there's ever an urgent or really important announcement that we need to make. We make it to our groups to make sure that people can see it and then know and over the last couple months, for those of you who did have client groups for your bookkeeping, you were able to go on those groups. And do mass videos to educate everyone on where they can then ask their questions right on the video for everyone to see. So it creates more of a community involvement and also saves you time by continually saying the same thing over and over again on the phone and email. Groups within Facebook are fantastic. And I would highly suggest for people to start thinking about using them just the way I was describing it, because it creates a community for your clients as well. It's a new thought process of doing it for bookkeepers, but it really works. Another thing that works that doesn't so much relate to bookkeepers so much, but events

 

15:47

so if you don't ever offer events in your Facebook, well in your business page, in your business in general, don't have it on your Facebook page. That's another tab you can take out

 

16:00

But if you do offer events like an indie financial year party, or a if you want to start doing events in your group to connect with your clients a bit more, you can use that tool as well, to create an increased engagement that is really exciting and really goes a long way, once again, with customer satisfaction and engagement overall. Plus, it also shows people that you are more than just a bookkeeper. It shows people that you have a bit more personality, and that you actively want to get involved with them. So certain bookkeepers, this won't work. But for other bookkeepers, this will work really, really well. And it will create a bit of a hype around your business as well. Another thing that would be really similar to events is offers. So this again, is only going to work for fair few bookkeepers, and general not everyone is going to be able to use this offering that Facebook does.

 

17:06

If you don't ever aren't ever going to offer discounts or anything like that, take it off your page so that it's not an empty page on Facebook for you. Nothing is worse when you go to a section in a Facebook page and it's empty, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and authoritative bookkeeper. What offers is for is for basically showing in discounts that you are offering or any offers in general you are offering in the past couple of weeks Off The Hook was offering one time bookkeeper not bookkeeper, you guys are bookkeepers, one time jobkeeper help. This is for clients that they weren't already working with and for clients that they knew that probably wouldn't be ongoing clients but because anyone that does support it as many people as possible for job keeper to keep Australian businesses going, she wanted to offer this service. So we didn't do this. But we could have put that service under offers to let people know that this was something that they could get involved with, to help and support them. So it doesn't always have to be a discount or sale. It can also be an offer, that's a one time offer. It's not going to last

 

18:26

long. She's not going to be doing this ongoing. So it's an offer, it's not a surface. So you can do that as well. Another thing that has offered in the name is job offers. Again, if you're never going to want to hire on Facebook, take this tab off again. But if you do want to hire on Facebook, job offers is a fantastic tool. Facebook just keeps improving upon over the last couple of years. At first I would say you know two years ago, don't use It is not worth your time. But now they have improved this section so well, that it's basically just like Seek or LinkedIn job offers, which is fantastic.

 

19:13

So in this section of Facebook, you're able to put your job application up and it goes for out the specific demographics that you were looking for. Just like you would be doing it for an ad. And you can put it out there and get applicants, applicants coming through. And it's just like using any other employment service where you can go through check off to see the ones that have been contacted, who haven't been contacted once you have hired interviewed everything. It's a really great platform now and it's something that for those of you bookkeepers who are are expanding because of COVID it's a really great option for you to look at to hire on.

 

19:56

Finally, in this section, I want to talk about community I think community is one of those sections that no one really knows what it's for. But it's actually a really powerful tool that when used properly, it can go a long way. It's basically another way of offering people reviews and offering the real engagement in real social proof on how amazing you are at what you do and how amazing and supportive you are for your clients. So in community, anyone can post on your page, but it goes directly into the community section so that it's not actually anything that you post all of the content that is done in community is from other people. So if other people were to do a post in tag, your business, it goes in that community section, which is really fantastic because if someone is singing your praise on Their own Facebook tags you, it comes up for you, as well. And it's a really great way to really get involved with your clients as well.

 

21:09

So that's something that you can always look at. And that's why I do put community quite high on the tabs order list. Because if you do work at creating that community, it can be really essential for your social presence and social proof, which is amazing. Now, let's go on to the actual engagement strategies that Facebook offers, because there's a lot and I think some of them I'm going to skim past because a lot of you know most of the different ways of actually engaging on Facebook, but I do want to go over them just so that everyone is aware of how they work in why they're worth their time. First thing I want to talk about is posting everyone knows what post thing is you post an image, post a picture, post a blog, then it goes up there. And you can get likes, comments shares all that jazz. What people don't know is that when you post and people share increases or likes or comments increase increases the level of engagement and reach that happens in Facebook. So the reason why I always tell clients of ours to make sure that there having the correct

 

22:32

let's say, audience on their Facebook page, liking and commenting on their posts is because you want to make sure your reach is spreading in the direction that you want it to go to. So, for example, if you have 100 Facebook followers on your business page, but 20 of those followers are friends and family, who are never going to work with you who are not your ideal clients. That means 20% of that reach that, you know, your friends and family will like, comment and share your posts. That's great. But 20% of that reach is not can be accurate and targeted to directly to the clients that you're wanting them to. So you really want to make sure that when you're looking at trying to increase your followers, you're not just being focused on the number basis. It's the engagement basis that you want. You want to make sure anyone who is following you is engaged. So forget about having 2000 5000 followers.

 

23:40

If you have 5000 followers and only 100 people are your actual actual ideal client persona. That's not going to do much for you and your business. So focus more on having quality followers over quantity, because with your posts, the more quality reach that you have, the better it is for your business over quantity. So that's something to really try hard to get your head around. But it's really important when you do get your head around it. The same goes for stories. Now stories is something I know a lot of bookkeepers don't use. But I would love to create an actual masterclass to show you how stories can help you build a higher amount of engagement and a higher amount of community involvement by using Off The Hook bookkeeping as an example, and this is something that I'm going to be starting to work on at the end of this month. I'm hoping to be able to show you guys what you can do in regards of stories to keep your content still professional, because let's face it, you're bookkeepers, you still want to look professional, but there are ways of doing stories that you can still very much look professional and really be able to target your clients and your lead generation options to again, either grow your business or just keep it relevant.

 

25:09

So stories can be really effective. They're only 24 hours long. So you want to make sure that if you do do stories, you do them consistently so that you stay at the top of mind of the people who are following you. It's a really great way and it's an awesome way I love it for bookkeepers because if I had a bookkeeper, I do my own bookkeeping, but if I had a bookkeeper for my business, and I'm one of those ones that is quite forgetful because I'm doing so many things. I constantly saw stories coming up in my Facebook, I would hundred percent being more responsive to your emails because he would be in the front of my mind. You would get a lot more done if a lot more of your clients are thinking about you more often, positively as well not in a negative sense in a positive sense. So stories can definitely do that for you.

 

26:02

Another thing that does that for you is Facebook Live. I am live streaming this podcast. So people are actually being able to see my face and see my hands move crazy like they do when I do podcasts, to our Facebook group right now. And it is a great way of communicating and offering that behind the curtain look of what your business is like. It creates a much better interaction and community sense of your business. And like I said before, if you have our group, you can do any regulation updates and stimulus updates for what we're still going through with COVID in that group in a live feed. It's a fantastic way of communicating with your clients. And at The Savvy Bookkeeper; We absolutely love it and I've only started to do it these past month and a half. I believe it's been now And it is great to actually be able to communicate with our clients on a more consistent basis. It goes a long way and it really offers a higher level of support for your clients, especially for bookkeepers. Some other things that you're able to do on Facebook that include extreme amount of engagements

 

27:23

is creating polls. So you can ask your clients certain things about what are they doing this weekend? How are things going? If you want to do new service, what is the client think about this? You can do a poll. If you want to start offering weekly live feeds, what days will it be good for them? You can really get engagement in really fantastic market market research done for your business through Facebook polls, and Facebook loves you using Facebook polls. So if you ever give them The option of doing any q&a sessions or anything like that, they love it and they love to promote it as well. So that's definitely something that if you can think of a strategy for it for your business, trying to include your polls.

 

28:16

Another thing that we're going to be starting to work on more is watch parties. So not all of our podcasts we film at the same day at the same time. So what we might start doing is offering the live feed in watch parties so people can actually watch the video; later. Watch parties can be used for pretty much any kind of social media video that is offering. And it's a great way of getting the community together all at once so everyone can watch something together. It's fantastic and it's really useful for a lot of our customers in a lot of your clients will love it to be able to watch something at the same time exactly the same days you and again you can use this for bookkeepers you would use this for educational times to sit down and explain something that everyone is happening right now like COVID in jobkeepers and keeping them updated as to how you can support them again to cut down on the phone time in email time of doing everything individually to each client. Another thing that doesn't so much relate to bookkeepers is product tagging. So product tagging is when you do a post or story and you tag your actual product that you have on Facebook. This is really meant for more ecommerce and product based customers for Facebook. But if you offer base

 

29:58

products that you have All the time like right now a jobkeeper application, you can have that right and tag it to the posts that you do in the stories that you do so that people can click on the tag and then directly go in pick it up, which is really handy. Now all bookkeepers can use this application but for those of you who can, I would highly suggest to do it because it does make the buying process much easier and more instant as well.

 

30:29

The final thing that works really well with the engagement based content is newsfeeds. Now, I've had a love hate relationship with news feeds business news feeds over the last couple years because Facebook keeps changing where news feeds are and that can be very frustrating when you are trying to actively engage on your business news feed. So what a business news feed is is when you Go in like or follow another business page, or another member of Facebook; on behalf of your business, you actually create your own daily feed for your business just like your personal account has. So what you can do is go on that feed And like and comment and share their professional feeds to get engagement going to them as well to also then bring it back to you and help them know that you're there to engage with them and support them. We do this for both Savvy Bookkeeper and Off The Hook. And I do this typically I'll sit down three days a week, and I'll spend about five minutes typically I don't go over five to 10 minutes on each profile. Just going through commenting, liking and engaging with people on the news feed the whole point of the of our businesses following each other is To engage with the businesses into get social,

 

32:06

the whole point of social media is to be social, the main goal of Facebook is still to be social. So these news feeds allow you to be social on behalf of the business that you were looking that you're working for or that you own. So it's a really great way to directly connect with your clients. For off the hook bookkeeping, we follow our clients, as long as they have a Facebook page, we follow them. And I make a point of liking commenting celebrating their wins, because it shows that their bookkeeper really does care about their business more than just getting a paycheque in the numbers. Because they're, as everyone knows, there is more to business than just numbers. There is heart, their soul, there's values and everyone has a reason for having a business. So you want to celebrate that with your clients and show that you are more than a bookkeeper, you are also a business owner and you want them to succeed.

 

33:05

It goes a long way. We do the same thing with Savvy. So we, you know, if we don't have you actually, this is good point. If we don't have you on our socials, make sure to tag yourself and I will make sure that we are following you. But we make a point of being able to try and follow as many as our clients as possible and on behalf of Savvy because we do care about your success, about your growth about your wins, because that's the whole reason why Savvy is here. We want to support you and the best way of supporting small businesses is supporting them through likes, shares and comments. And it's something that we really try and focus on to create a high level of support through our social medias.

 

33:56

So by you showing that support then to your clients, it goes a long way from them as well it shows that you care. The final section that is really, really important for Facebook business pages, is the analytics and the built in application. So I'm not going to go too much into this because this could be a whole other topic itself. But basically what these include is your ad centre to create your ads. It includes the insights to understand your audience analytics. It includes the publishing tools that Facebook now offers, which now you can schedule actual posts, stories and everything through Facebook through their publishing tools, which is fantastic. I use it quite often with all the businesses that I manage. And again, it shows your audience optimization show it gives you tips on what you can actually improve If your Facebook page about.

 

35:01

So, I would definitely make sure to look at those sections. I know, small business owners who don't really know Facebook very well tend to not click on those sections of their Facebook page because you're afraid you're going to break something. Nothing in Facebook is so breakable it can't be fixed. So make sure you go into your insights and go through and poke around and see what it's showing you. It will tell you how many new people you have to your Facebook page, when those people are online, when it's best for you to be posting so that people are online to see your posts. It's a great tool to be able to understand your demographics more to make sure that your marketing efforts are being done properly to maximise your overall goal of doing marketing in the first place.

 

35:53

So those are tools I would hundred percent to at least just take a peek at you don't have to use Use them on a daily basis if you don't want to or on a weekly basis, but it's definitely worth going in and looking it up to understand what information is there. Because with all social media, sometimes all you have to do is get one light bulb moment, and everything can change from there. Now, to finish off this podcast, I do want to do a bit of a understanding moment. I know you guys are business busy business owners, and that learning new tools can be exhausting and overwhelming. So I know I went through a whole heap of different applications that Facebook offers. If you do nothing but take away three of the topics that I mentioned today, and start implementing strategies, that is amazing.

 

36:54

So you don't have to go through and work on all of your ongoing audience interaction, all of your static interactions, all of your different kinds of posting strategies, pick three things. What I would do is I'm going to have a blog to go with this. So then each main topic, you can pick one for each topic. What I would suggest is for your static content, make sure you pick the correct template. If

 

37:27

you do nothing else in your static content, but pick your correct template. That will go a very long way, and then fill the template at. Second for the ongoing audience involvement. If you do nothing else, then monitoring in

 

37:44

taking off the ones that you aren't going to use like job offers or events. It helps clean up your page for the engagement strategies. You don't have to do stories posts, Facebook Lives, polls, watch party's everything like that. It's not necessary. Pick one, pick one to start working on, and do it for a month or two and see how it goes. You don't have to do everything all at once, pick one and get really good at it. Then once it becomes second nature for you do another one. It helps make sure that what you are working on is going to be successful. In the long run. It'll save you time anyways, the same goes for the analytics. You don't have to look at all of them. Pick one, just pick one and see what you can learn from and just have it starting to become a habit to check it. It doesn't have to be anything too intense. Just start understanding what's happening on your page.

 

38:51

By having more understanding about your page, you'll have more control over your overall marketing and overall digital presence. And it will I promise go a long way. To finish this off, I want to rehash what Facebook business pages are originally designed for. They are here to create a community using, that by using the business tools to help you understand your customers. This is such an important section because by doing this, you're able to build your brand awareness and just create, again that community where it shows that you care about your clients. It's so important, and I will kind of want today's episode to be the main takeaway is that everyone can be a marketer with the right toolkit.

 

39:46

And Facebook is working really hard at making sure that they can provide a toolkit where, again, if you just use three of the things I talked about in this episode, it gets you that much closer to being your own businesses marketer and doing some real good for your business, I hope you've been able to learn a lot for today's episode. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to book in a time I'm going to have Will include my booking schedule in this podcast because I know I went through a lot of content. So I want to make sure you're going to get the most out of it. And, you know, just ask people start having the conversations open up what other people are doing on their Facebook pages, because the more small businesses are able to master the Facebook pages and their marketing, the better of this Australian economy, and especially for bookkeepers. If you guys can master your marketing then imagine how many other small businesses you can support.

 

40:54

It's a bit exciting. Thank you so much for listening to me today and As always guys, make sure you stay safe, sane and savvy. Bye