Profile or Business Page.
Using your personal profile page to promote your massage business is actually against the Facebook Terms of Service. That means you will need to create a Facebook Business page for your massage therapy business.
It’s against the Facebook Terms to use your personal account to represent something other than yourself (example: your business), and you could permanently lose access to your account if you don’t convert it to a Page. ~Facebook Help
Set up your Personal Profile and keep your profile private and share with your friends and family. You can still have your website linked to your personal profile so that your friends and family can see it. They should be your top referrers especially when you are just starting out in your massage business.
Set up a Business Page.
I am not going to go into all the details on how to set up a Facebook business page. Just follow the steps and start creating your Facebook page here.
The main thing to be aware of is the page name appears on top of your cover photo and next to any posts you make. The username is part of your URL….meaning it will say www.facebook.com/username. Choosing a user name can be confusing. Do you want to use your business name or your own name or the keywords like massageseattle? Keywords in the username could help get your page found in a Google search. If you make your user name your business name, it makes it easier for people to remember.
Use the Keywords in the name of the page (massage your city or some variation of that). Set up the About Section to include all the pertinent contact info for your business. Have information about you right there. What solution do you provide?
If you use online scheduling systems, see if they have an app you can install directly on your Facebook page for scheduling.
Know the image sizes for covers, profiles, posts and ads. The sizes are constantly changing so refer to Facebook help.
Make sure your profile is professional. I can not tell you the number of profiles I have seen of massage therapists who are at wild parties, doing shots and drugs and who are wearing very over exposing clothes in their Facebook profiles that is open for the public to see.
How to Write Posts that get more engagement and more page likes.
The way Facebook works is that they like posts that get a high engagement – like, comment or share – and will put that post out to more of your followers. The more people that like, comment and share, the more people will see it. Right now the posts that go the farthest are posts that stir emotion: cute cat/dog/animal videos, crazy things like the blue dress phenomenon, outrageous news and events. You have to compete for attention on Facebook. The average user just scrolls through their feed a few times a day and your post will be on amid hundreds of posts from pages/friends. How will you get noticed? Here is what I have found.
- Video posts currently have a higher engagement rate according to Facebook, especially Facebook Live.
- Link posts get the next highest visibility. To create a link post, just place a link to your website into the post box. It will scan for a second and pull up images from your page. Choose the appropriate image to share. You can then also delete the actual link and the user will still be able to click on the link to get to your destination. To do this you will need to use OG tags (Open Graph tags). For WordPress: To get Facebook to pull the correct picture, you will need a plugin such as the WordPress Open Graph or the Facebook Official Plugin . You will have to find out how to add them to whatever website system you are using. The image size is also important for this. Be sure to use image dimensions that match up well with the 484×252 space given (1200×627 is the optimal upload size.)
- Find posts from other people that get a lot of engagement. Quotes, nice pictures, funny pictures with sayings on them. Follow this list of Facebook Candy created by Mari Smith or follow this list of massage related pages. (Lists are going away as a feature, but this one still works so far.)
- Create your own photos with sayings on them and place them on your website so when you create a link post, Facebook will pull that photo up and show it in a post. Use metatags on the page that also will be pulled into the post on Facebook and will make people want to click on the link to find out more. Use free photo editing software: www.picmonkey.com and/or www.canva.com
- Ask a question. T or F questions are good. Also things like “What would you do if you won a million dollars”?
- Create a fill in the blank question.
A Week without a massage is like _________ - Use one of these massage related quote photos that I have collected on my page for you.
The only way people will see posts for sure is if they use the ‘Get notifications’ feature and then actually see it in the notifications.
So it gets harder and harder to get your posts seen.
The idea behind all of this is to get more engagement per post to get more people to like your page. When creating your posts you can add a call to action for some of them that are more related to massage or stress. In a way this all really seems silly. You have to be more of an entertainer than an informational provider. You have to decide if this will work for you and your business. There are also other ways to get more clients like having a really good website (That you can actually even do yourself!).
When you then create a post asking people to make an appointment, you most likely will get little response but because you have a full page of fans you can now pay for posts and try to reach them to make an appointment.
Anna Menzel says
Using Facebook to market your massage therapy services sounds like a great idea. You just have to be careful how you go about it. Seek first to create value by creating interesting, informative content so that your business will be perceived right. Whatever you do, don’t seem desperate or put out sub-par comments or articles.