3 Tips To Grow Your Bakery Using Facebook

Marketing your bakery on Facebook can be a real challenge sometimes… especially since the last update that made it harder than ever to get your posts seen by your fans in their newsfeed.

The trick to surviving the update is to make it work for you.  Facebook’s goal was to get businesses putting out more content that readers would like to see and less “sales-pitch-centric” posts.  If you know how to follow the rules, you can easily pull ahead of your competition and reach more of your fans.

#1 Make Your Posts Easy To Act On

When you post on Facebook, make it easy for a customer to act on your post.  For example… here is a real post from a bakery around Easter time:

A week from Sunday is Easter!  Be sure to place your orders for your Easter Basket and dessert for your table!

The problem here is that they are making me do work if I want to buy anything.

• I have to find their number so I can call and find out more about the basket, like what is in it or what it costs
• They didn’t include a picture of the basket, so I have no idea if we’re talking about a small basket or a big basket.
• If I don’t recognize their name, then I’m not sure if this bakery is one near my house or work, so I have to hunt up their address and see how far away they are.
• When do I need to order to have it by Easter?

The odds are not in their favor that I will be willing to do all that for a basket.  I’ll probably just keep picking something up at Wal-Mart like I have before.

To make this post work, it’s as simple as including a picture of the basket and saying this instead:

Easter is just a week away, so give us a call at (555) 123-4567 to get one of our Sweet Treat Easter Baskets for your table.  You’ll get enough cookies, cupcakes, and chocolate covered pretzels to please the whole family.  (Don’t forget to get one for a friend too!)

 #2 Don’t Forget the New Facebook Guidelines

According to Facebook, they don’t want you to post overly promotional content… which they define as:

1. Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
2. Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
3. Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads

An occasional promotional post won’t hurt you, but if you keep doing it, then you will see your organic reach decline until it reaches 0.  According to Facebook:

Beginning in January 2015, people will see less of this type of content in their News Feeds. As we’ve said before, News Feed is already a competitive place — as more people and Pages are posting content, competition to appear in News Feed has increased. All of this means that Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time.

Here’s an example from the Facebook business team on how to correct your posts following their guidelines.

Before: “You’re in luck ladies.  The SUMMER SALE is here.  BIG DISCOUNTS, up to 50% off.  Hurry in.  These deals are going out of style.”  Then on the image, it has even more promotional text.

Instead, they say you should word it like: “This summer, you can wear more, for less.  Stop by now and score some of the summer’s best looks, while they last.”

Both messages say the same thing – but the first one feels like a salesman screaming at you from the curb, while the second one feels a lot more like someone recommending that you come in without being pushy. 

#3 Learn How To Use Post Boosting

Facebook lets you boost posts for as little as $1 for 1 day to reach a broader audience.  This can be a really great, and affordable, way to get more people paying attention to your posts.

Any time you’re boosting, make sure you do these things:

1. Specify an audience –
   Odds are, you want local business, so at the very least, limit the audience to nearby areas.  If your post is aimed more at women, or more at men, then limit the audience.
2. Think about the duration of the boost.
   Some things might make sense to boost out for a day – like daily specials.  Others might make sense to post once and boost over several days – like the week leading up to a holiday.
3. Make sure your image meets the 20% or less text rule.
   If your image has text on it, the text cannot take up more than 20% of the image.  The crazy part about this is how Facebook calculates it, they overlay a grid on the image, and see how many blocks have text in them… so sometimes just nudging the text around can let you have the same amount of text but less grids touched.  You can upload it to their grid tool to test it ahead of time: https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay