Facebook. One in five people have an account. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world (just after China and India). Because of this, one of the best ways to advertise your business and services is to stay active on Facebook…If you’re using Facebook for business, are you making the most of your page?

As a business owner, you will want your Facebook business page to look as professional as possible. For this reason, we suggest using high resolution images that fit the proportions the diagram below when choosing your cover image. In this diagram, the correct proportions for the cover image is shown. It is important to be mindful about important elements of your cover image are as the whole image is not clearly shown. For example, you don’t want your promotional offer or website URL in the bottom left hand corner of the image because it will be cut off by the profile picture (which we recommend to be your company logo). Ideally, your cover photo should always be 851 pixels X 315 pixels. Image size is always important in Social Media, platforms such as Facebook or Twitter will never show the full image when previewing if it isn’t the exact size it needs to be. Which can be annoying. Dimensions for images that you want use as posts on your news feed should be at 470 pixels wide X 394 pixels tall as not to be cut off in preview mode.

Part of using Facebook to your advantage is to know everything about it. The best way to do this is through using Facebook Business Manager to keep track of your analytics and features. By using Business Manager, you will understand what posts are working and what posts aren’t. If you notice that your Like count is dropping, isn’t moving or isn’t going at the speed you want it to, look at your analytics. Find the posts that have the most likes and create similar posts to them. People like consistency when scrolling through a page, it is aesthetically pleasing and encourages the user to keep looking. So if you are using a certain filter on your pictures, keep using it! If informal language gets a higher response than formal language, then keep it going. You want as much engagement with your followers as possible. If people see engagement, they will come back for more. Don’t forget, humans are social creatures and are drawn in by interaction.

If you haven’t got posts that have the engagement count that you want, go to your direct competition’s page and see what they are doing right. If you own a Coffee shop, for example, but you aren’t getting much love on Facebook, go to Costa or Starbucks Facebook pages and see what they’re doing right. Anything they can do, you can do to. Look at the style of pictures that they are using, look at the time of day that they are posting, and look at their captions. Look at the engagement from customers. If the same people are liking more of their posts, then you have further market knowledge. In the end, that’s what it comes down to. Market knowledge will help you optimise your Facebook.

So you have your followers, great! Now keep them engaged, give them something more than a normal Facebook page. Add apps. If you go to our Facebook page (link here), you can see apps relevant to our business. As we offer social media service, we have Instagram and Twitter feeds pulling into our Facebook, linking everything together. This is a great way of upping your following across the board with Social Media. If I go to someone’s Facebook that I already follow because I like their content and see that they have an Instagram or Twitter account too, I’m almost always going to go and follow their other accounts. As a user, I always want more content. And that’s how people think. No one wants to scroll through their Facebook feed and see the exact same posts over and over again. People want more! And that’s why it’s important to have a strong presence. Be consistent and give people what they want. If you do that, they will always come back. To find any apps that you want to add to you Facebook page, go to www.facebook.com/games. The screen that it should bring you to is full of games and looks completely irrelevant. But don’t be fooled. In the search bar on the page, type in the name of any app that you want on your Facebook page and hit the ‘Install Now’ button. If you install an app by accident or decide that you don’t want to use that app anymore, you can always go to the page settings, go down to Apps and click the X relevant to that App.

So, now you know how to optimize your Facebook images, find the best way to advertise your business, how to keep your followers, and how to app apps to your Facebook business page. So go forth! Make your Facebook Business page completely your own. Interested to read more, visit Facebook’s Facebook for Business link.