Linda Dozier: Looking for Free Ways to Promote Your Business? Check These 10 Options

If you want to expand your reach, increase your engagement, and boost your revenue, then promoting your business is crucial.

Utilizing social media is an important aspect of business. It is the most popular method of online communication among your customers, and people like to have different channels through which to communicate with businesses.

Promoting your business might sound daunting, but it’s actually quite simple.

Here are 10 different online platforms where you can promote your business for free.

1. A Facebook Business Page

Creating a Facebook page for you business is the first step to promoting your business.

Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the United States. It has over 2 billion monthly users.

The other plus of having a Facebook page for your business is that you can use that page to promote your other Facebook pages. For example, perhaps your business has multiple departments or has acquired other businesses; you can use your Facebook business page to promote the Facebook pages of all related people, brands, or companies.

This increases brand awareness and helps people recognize your brand more easily.

2. Join Facebook Groups as the Page

Facebook groups are where like-minded people come together to share interests in certain things. Much like other internet forums, people use Facebook groups to learn, express opinions, or network.

Joining Facebook groups that are related to your business’s industry, service, or product is an incredibly useful way to promote your business. You’ll know that you’re promoting your business to people who will be interested in it because those people have opted to participate in a group where the topic is the main point of discussion.

Make sure that you’re following all Facebook group rules, however, because some of them don’t allow for personal promotion or advertising.

3. Stream from Your Page on Facebook Live

Facebook Live is an underused feature of Facebook, but a great way to promote your business to current and future fans.

All Facebook Live requires is navigating to the status editor on your Facebook page and clicking the button that says “Live.” This will open a camera that you can point at yourself or something else. Once you go live, your Facebook page followers and fans will be alerted.

The best part about the Facebook Live feature is that the Live videos can be shared like any other Facebook post. So if you use Live in a creative way and make a compelling live video, it will likely be shared, driving more traffic to your Facebook page.

4. Use Facebook Messenger Chatbots Connected to the Page

Facebook Messenger chatbots are one of the best ways to promote your business because they are easy, quick, and efficient.

Messenger chatbots are a great way to increase engagement among Facebook users, including those who are not already fans or followers of your page.

A chatbot is a piece of software that is programmed with dialogues to lead a user through a marketing or sales funnel. They can also be used for other purposes like entertainment, functionality (weather, planning, etc.), and more.

Facebook Messenger chatbots can help promote your business by engaging with users in a humanizing way. Best of all, they can be accessed by those who might not already be engaged with your page through things like click-to-Messenger ads, which are Facebook ads that direct a user to a Messenger window with your chatbot instead of your website.

Messenger chatbots can also be used on your personal website or business website, your WordPress site, or advertised on your Instagram business account.

5. Post to Facebook Stories

The “stories” feature began on Snapchat and has moved from social platform to social platform. Now, Facebook has its own “stories” feature, where you can keep your followers, fans, and friends updated with photos, videos, and text from your day.

Facebook Stories is a great method to promote your business.

When you post a story, all of your friends, fans, and followers are notified, and it is present at the top of their Facebook News Feed.

You can use these stories to advertise promotions, share about company culture, talk about business activities, and more. It’s a great way to promote your business to people who might come across the story while browsing.

6. Take Advantage of Facebook Messenger Stories

Facebook Messenger Stories are the same as the previous two Facebook Story features, but can be posted directly from a Messenger window. This makes it easy to promote your business while being engaged on Messenger.

Since Messenger is by default optimized for mobile, this feature makes it easy to promote your business on the go.

7. Create Facebook Events as the Page

Facebook events are great for promoting your business because they are created through a specific Facebook page.

For example, use your Facebook business page to create a Facebook event for webinars, company events, and more.

Advertise your Facebook events on groups that allow it and share common interests. If your company is hosting a marketing webinar, it would be a great opportunity to promote your business to create a Facebook event for the webinar and share it to marketing groups.

8. Get on Pinterest

Pinterest is an underrated social platform, especially for businesses.

Known as the home to all things aesthetic, such as fashion, interior decorating, and beauty, it is also a great place to promote your business.

Pinterest also features educational materials to help you learn how to best utilize the platform to market and promote your business and business.

Take a look at the most popular Pinterest categories and then decide how you can use those for your business. Then, create pins that promote your business page content.

The best part is that Pinterest accounts for businesses also feature analytics, so you can monitor and measure what works and doesn’t work.

9. Pin to Pinterest Group Boards

Pinning content to Pinterest Group Boards will increase your reach, drive traffic to your site, promote your business, and help you rank higher on Pinterest.

Pinterest Group Boards are exactly as they sound — multiple Pinterest users pin to the same boards and it becomes a collaborative effort.

Typically, these group boards reflect shared interests among users. You can find Pinterest Group Boards by browsing the boards of users that you follow, or browsing Facebook groups to see if anyone is advertising group boards.

If you find a Pinterest Group Board that matches the content of your Facebook page, then joining the group board would be a great way to promote your business.

10. Try Out Tailwind Tribes

Tailwind is a scheduling and analytics tool for Pinterest, but it’s also a great method to promote your business page.

Tailwind Tribes is a feature of Tailwind that allows groups of like-minded content creators to come together to share each others’ content. What better way to promote your business than to have other respect content creators helping your expand your reach?

You can easily pin to Tribes by using the Tailwind extension that has a handy “add to Tribes” feature. Keep in mind, however, that Tailwind Tribes is intended to be a collaborative effort; so in order to promote your business or business, it’s important that you are doing your part to help share other users’ content.

Promoting Your Business Pays Off

Promoting your business is not as difficult as it might seem.

There are a number of tools at your disposal right within the Facebook platform.

But if you’re willing to explore and expand, you might find even more tools to promote your business, and maybe even some nice networking opportunities along the way!

Promotion is a great way to expand your reach, engage more customers, and grow your business; so why not put a couple of these tactics to use and start promoting your business today?

Republished by permission. Original here.

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This article, "Looking for Free Ways to Promote Your Business? Check These 10 Options" was first published on Small Business Trends