Best practices for Facebook management are becoming well known and well documented industry standards. Here is my list of best practices for small business Facebook pages:

1. Invite your personal Facebook friends and contacts to ‘like’ your page and ask your business associates to promote your page as well.
2. Promote your page on your website, in your newsletters and other marketing material.
3. Use images in Facebook posts. Interaction increases significantly with the use of graphics.
4. Run contests on Facebook to engage fans.
5. Ask questions in Facebook posts to increase engagement.
   1. Fill in the blank posts are popular: “Monday for me are ______”
   2. Ask for opinions: “What is your favorite XYZ?”
   3. Use humor!: Funny pics, videos or anecdotes related to your business or industry are often engaging.
6. Minimize product and sales posts. Only make 5-10% of your posts (max) about your products and services. Followers don’t want to be bombarded with ads. A main purpose of social media is to foster relationships and connections to potential and active customers.
7. Provide useful/actionable information in your posts.
8. Create ‘check-in’ deals that Facebook users can redeem using their smart phone.
9. Use the ‘promote a post’ feature to keep the most relevant page posts at the top of your Facebook page.
10. Offer coupons that are exclusive offers to people who ‘like’ your page.
11. Target local offers to followers who would benefit from the info:
    1. Facebook has a ‘target by location’ feature allowing you to show selected posts only to people in a specific region of the world, country, state or even city!
12. Use Facebook ads to grow your target market of followers.
13. Post content regularly.
    1. Facebook recommends that business post a couple times a week, but some successful businesses post multiple times a day.
    2. Start off slow and measure the number of post likes and level of engagement over time to determine an optimal number of posts for YOUR target market.
    3. There are free tools like Hootsuitethat will allow you to prepost content very easily.  However, Facebook also allows you to prepost content as well.
       1. Learn more about “Auto Scheduling Social Media Posts”
14. Respond to all feedback and written posts from followers quickly.
15. Pay attention to Facebook site statistics to see which posts garner the most ‘likes’ and engagement and to see what time of day is best to post content.
16. Embrace your fans!
    1. Encourage them to post photos and info on your wall and then repost, highlight or mention them on your wall.
    2. Popular dealership Facebook pages like Mooers Volvo in Richmond, regularly feature fan photos of their personal vehicles in the Facebook header image.  Fans love it! They tell all their friends and engage with the dealership more consistently as a result.
17. Embrace your business partners! Promote their websites and social media pages on your own page and they will likely do the same.

By contrast, worst Facebook practices would be:

1. Create a Facebook page and then don’t use it.
2. Don’t invite anyone to like the page.
3. Don’t promote or link to it from your website or other places.
4. Use Facebook solely as a place to sell products and post ads.
5. Don’t use graphics or just use poor quality ones.
6. Don’t create a header image.
7. Don’t link back to your website.
8. Don’t fill in the business details such as address, hours of operation, mission, etc.

Read my Best Practices for Facebook Page Design as well!