Let's redesign Facebook pages for small businesses.

Facebook pages provides a platform for businesses/brands to connect with their followers or potential customers. Businesses can provide more information about their company, products and engage more with their followers in a 2 way communication. Users can go through the brand information, shop the products, latest posts, interact through messenger or engage through likes, comments or tagging the page. 

FB pages can go a long way in providing and maintaining a brand identity for small businesses. Whenever a SMB advertises on FB, users usually have a tendency to view more information if they like the ad by going to FB page for that business where SMB can share their story and engage the users.

So what would the goal of improvement be? Will it be - improving engagement, retention, or revenue?

FB pages can be very meaningful to small businesses to create and maintain their footprint in the consumer mind. Once a consumer sees the FB ad and redirects to the FB page, how can businesses more meaningfully engage with their potential customers so as to create a brand identity in minds of these potential customers? High engagement would lead to consideration and thus purchase of products for that business. Thus i would take the goal would be to improve engagement for the users that come to FB page for a small business.

In order to measure the improvement, the following metrics i would consider:

Engagement on FB page could be through- likes, comments on a post, tagging a page, view shoppable products, go to FB shop, interact through a messenger (send a message). Thus, engagement can be measured through- following if interacted with Zarin ad or post earlier,  number of interactions per post/ impressions, number of users that click the link in the post/number of people that see an impression.

I would now define user groups for which engagement on FB pages is to be improved, then would list their pain points and list solutions to solve them and summarize in the end.

There are small businesses which have less than 10000 following would be the ones i am going to particularly pickup as these have some presence but need to increase and deepen their presence in mind of their potential customers.

The major pain points of these small businesses would be:

1. Customers dont identify with the brand at all and ignore it many times

2. Creating content that can lead to capturing customers attention

3. Dealing with negative feedback

4. Creating trust about their brand so that customers can invest to purchase

5. Responding to customer questions or feedback over comments

2, 4, 5 are the main pain points as 1 and 3 can to some extent be solved when 2,4,5 are worked upon. If there is an effort in building trust for the brand then even if there is some negative feedback, the customer will have some trust to keep on engaging with the brand. Also If the content created is interesting there are chances that users dont ignore and pay attention to the page content.

In order to solve these painpoints following could be done for SMBs:

2.Creating content that can lead to capturing customers attention

 a. Help in creating content through suggesting video formats and image formats like interactive pictures, boomerangs, etc.

b. Stats for the users to understand which of the images performed really well

c. Ability to A/B test

d. Recommending other similar pages to like which the user is following not on a particular page but instead through a sponsored ad for promoting not just one product but the entire business

e. Agencies or freelancers contact to help in creating content

4. Creating trust about their brand so that customers can invest to purchase

a. encouraging customers to rate who make a purchase- have a rating system in place

b. Usually, customers who are dissatisfied leave feedback, encouraging customers to come and give feedback so that even the positive can be captured. Having an option to keep feedback posts accessible at the top in a separate section

c. banners/labels of secure payments, easy returns - pinned photos

d. sharing and pinning positive PR

e. sharing and pinning local events or the photos of the process through which products are made

5. Responding to customer questions or feedback over comments

a. Provide ability to the business to sort comments in order- question asked, negative feedback, positive feedback, others. - Train the facebook algorithm to understand the comments through NLP and give ability for businesses to filter them

b. Creating a bot to answer to generic questions like where are you loctaed, how many days do you ship in, can you give discount, etc. Give option to SMB to set up these basic questions and their answers.

I would prioritize what to implement based on- value for user, time required and risks/tradeoffs.

1.a. and d. have high user value, less time to implement and have low risk

2. As a new customer its really hard to get to meaningful feedback about a new business- pinning feedback posts is really helpful for users, ratings of the business. Even though risk is high here, end user value is really meaningful that seller would want to drive positive feedback and would very carefully look at maintaining high customer experience.

3. a. to start with as it would help small businesses respond to queries much easily and when we see a meaningful engagement happening, then create a bot. Even though implementation effort is high for NLP, risk is low as there is manual intervention in between for seller to decide what to respond. There is higher risk in the bot implementation and also more time consuming, even though user value is high for users in terms response is really quick.

So i would implement improving content creation through providing formats/templates for videos and photos that can be easily used to create engaging content. Sorting the comments so that seller can easily and quickly respond to them. Pinning feedback posts so that they are easily seen by users to drive more trust.