How to create and use a Facebook Business Page to help grow your pet care business. Updated for 2024!
Though some may consider Facebook a fading social media platform, the fact remains that over one-third of the Earth’s population is counted in the 2.9 billion users active on Facebook today. Of these nearly three billion users, it is estimated that 1.6 billion of them are connected to a small business. With these impressive numbers, it is clear that Facebook is an essential tool for any small business, especially if you want to connect with potential clients locally. With the high likelihood that most pet parents in your area are already on Facebook and may be using it to seek accommodations for their pets, it’s crucial that your company can use the platform to your advantage. In order to do so, you first need to make a Facebook page for your business.
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Without a Facebook page for your company or a listing on Yelp to establish some sort of social media presence online for your business, you are giving your competition a tremendous headstart by allowing them the opportunity to make connections with prospective clients ahead of you. Even if you only use it as a place to list your business description and contact information, Facebook should be a cornerstone of any company’s social media strategy.
Read on below to learn more about creating a Facebook business page and using it to engage with existing and potential clients. Providing your clients with a place where they can easily access you and expect a swift response adds a layer of authenticity to your business. This allows clients to build stronger connections with you and learn more about the services you provide much more quickly. In fact, this level of accessibility could very well be the deciding factor on whether or not a pet parent chooses you as their new dog walker or pet sitter, so knowing how to use it to your advantage is vital.
Creating Your Free Facebook Business Page
The first step to utilizing Facebook’s platform to your company’s advantage is to create a free Facebook page for your business. You will need a personal Facebook account in order to do so, so sign up for one if you haven’t already. The process will only take a few moments, and you can do so using the link here. Once you have created an account, Facebook has a fantastic guide that will walk you through the necessary steps of building your business page. Make sure you choose the correct industry for your business and add as much information about your company as possible. You should also ensure that you add a link to your website so that clients have an easy way to access more information about your services and any New Client Forms they need to complete before requesting services from your company.
As you put together your page, have a clear picture in your mind of what your company’s website looks like. We highly recommend that you aim for your business page to look like a bite-sized version of your website. While there are obvious limitations, having as much continuity and flow between the two sites is most beneficial to your clients and your company’s brand recognition. This means including aspects that represent your business that can also be seen on your website, such as your company’s logo (which you can use as your account’s profile or cover photo) or photos you have taken of you and your team out in the field.
When creating your page, be sure to include relevant information about your business, such as what services you provide, your pricing, and what neighborhoods or areas you service. Your page should also contain multiple means of contacting you and an outgoing link to your website. Including this information, along with some photos of you and your team members or something like client reviews/testimonials, will help the personality of your business to shine through. It can also humanize you and your staff members and bring the locality of your business to life if potential clients are able to see familiar sights and faces within your photos.
In addition to having your business details and images on your page, you can also add a Call To Action button (CTA) to your page. The Call To Action can either be a link to your website or a way to contact you for your scheduling service directly – whether it be a phone number, an email address, or a Facebook Messenger link.
Adding Content To Your Facebook Business Page
Once your Facebook business page is built, it’s time to add some content to it! If you run a blog that you post to your website, send out monthly newsletters with helpful pet topics and tips, or have an Instagram account where you post cute photos of the pets under your care, then consider sharing those posts and pictures on Facebook. Posting content you and your team share with your clients can be a great way to engage other existing clientele or potential clients with your business. Not to mention that photos of happy four-legged friends are the best sort of advertisement a pet care business can provide that clients of all kinds will love!
Experiment a bit with posting until you can settle on a schedule that works for you. While it’s always great to have fresh content for your Facebook page, it’s important to remember not to overdo it. You should never spend more time curating content for your social media pages than caring for your clients, but perhaps you can start small with posing once or twice weekly. If that feels like too much, however, scale it back to a few updates per month or just post when you have the time. Some businesses have great success engaging with their clients and community while posting only a few times per week, so there’s no need to push yourself further than you or your team can.
Lastly, an important thing to remember regarding content you may want to post to your company’s Facebook page is that this is, first and foremost, a page dedicated to your business. While it might be tempting to post about personal details or topics unrelated to the realm of pet care, you should work to keep the personal and professional spheres of your Facebooking separate. Maintaining a positive, professional, and knowledgeable persona is integral to your reputation, team, and business. So run a tight ship and post only what’s appropriate!
Promoting Your Facebook Business Page
Once you have created your Facebook business page, customized it to fit your company’s aesthetic, and added lots of valuable content, you may be wondering how to get it out in the world and into the eyes of your target audience. Well, the perfect place to begin is with your own clients. Let them know that you have created a Facebook page and that, moving forward, they will be able to find company announcements, helpful pet information, and whatever other fun things you have decided to post there! You can also ask existing clients to leave reviews on your Facebook page if they are happy with your services. Reviews are one of the most effective ways to appeal to prospective clients and can result in a lot of growth for your business. After all, if given the choice between a business with zero reviews versus a business with multiple great reviews, it’s a no-brainer which company a client will go with! If you don’t want to directly ask clients to leave reviews or visit your Facebook page, you can also try adding a link to it on your website and within your email signature. This way, clients will have an easy way to seek it out and explore your content on their own time.
Engaging Your Clients And Followers
Now that you have turned your clients’ attention to your page and they have had a chance to “Like” it, this is where the magic starts to happen! Imagine the following scenario: you post an adorable photo of your client John Doe’s Corgi, Bubbles. John sees the image and shares it to his socials so all of his friends can see it. One of his followers happens to be his neighbor, who asks John when he sees the picture, “Who is that walking Bubbles? I’m in the market for a new dog walker myself after my old one closed their business.” John responds back with, “That’s my awesome dog walker - I absolutely love her! If you’re interested, here’s her number!” Next thing you know, John’s neighbor is hitting up your business and inquiring about the services you offer. Such is the incredible ripple effect of social media!
That’s why, in some ways, you should view your Facebook business page as a community board, with you as the community director. Just as you would find on a community board, post news and updates relating to your business. Are you running any special discounts for a particular holiday, offering discounts for new clients, or do you have a referral program that can allow existing clients to earn credits on their accounts? If so, your business page is a perfect place to announce and advertise those sorts of things. You can also use it to collaborate with other local businesses to boost a sense of community among your clients and widen the net of potential pet parents who might end up on your page as a result.
However, your Facebook business page isn’t just a place to post content one-sidedly for your clients to view and consume. Instead, if someone poses a question or leaves a concerning comment on one of your posts, don’t ignore it. Instead, engage with them! Answer their questions, address their concerns, and let your clients and followers know that there is a real person on the other side who they are seen and heard by. This will also prove to your audience that you are accessible and willing to work with your clients to improve your business and the service you offer.
Advertising With Facebook Ads
To help establish your business on Facebook and connect with your potential customers, you will need a well-thought-out business page for your company and clear and concise advertisements to help build your local audience.
In addition to resources on creating a Facebook business page, Facebook also offers a lot of assets and articles for creating a successful social media advertising campaign. They have advertising options for every level of experience and will walk you through the entire process of creating your ad campaign until it is up and running. They also offer tools for running, managing, and reporting your campaign that you can oversee yourself to ensure your ads are performing well and reaching the intended audience. With additional options to create ads geared towards specific zip codes or areas, the personalization you can infuse into your ads is even more likely to draw potential pet parents to your door.
The first step to setting up your Facebook ads is to settle on an objective for your campaign. This requires you to answer the all-important question, “What do I want this ad to accomplish for my business?” In the pet care industry, nothing is more critical than garnering new leads and boosting your company’s online presence through increased traffic to your website and business pages, so this should be where your primary focus lies.
Once you have your overall objective, you want to hone in on your audience. Concentrate on a specific area or zip code (Facebook refers to this as “dynamic localization”) and consider the demographics, interests, and behaviors of potential pet parents you are hoping to attract in those areas. Start broad and encourage your current clients to like your business page and leave a comment or rating. By doing so, you establish an audience that can help you create even more detailed and specific advertisements using a Facebook ad tool called Advantage Lookalike, which uses the interests of your current clientele to target new audience members with similar interests and behaviors.
As you put together your Facebook ad campaign, other vital things to consider are where you want your ads to feature on the website and in what format. Your ad campaigns can run on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Meta Audience Network, depending on your objectives. Advertising in more than one place expands your ad campaign’s reach and has no drawbacks, as it does not incur additional costs for you or your advertisement. Furthermore, your advertisement can be featured in feeds, mobile apps, as part of stories or reels, sponsored ads on Messenger, and much more.
To capitalize on these different ad placements, you must decide how to best present your business's highest selling points and overall experience to potential pet parents to convey why they should choose you over another company effectively. If you decide to place advertisements on Facebook feeds, for example, consider if you want a photo ad featuring empathic copy or a short video people can watch on the go. Length is another crucial thing to consider to ensure you maximize your audience’s attention and encourage them to engage with your ads. Facebook ads offer various formats and will undoubtedly have something that perfectly matches your advertising needs.
Once you have completed your ad, it’s time to order it. Once it’s ordered and ready to be released, it will begin to enter ad auctions each time there is an opportunity to show someone an ad. The ad will only be shown to someone if it is determined to be the best ad to show that particular audience member (and ads are only qualified to be directed to members of their target audiences). The winner of the ad auction is based on an ad’s “total value” and how it stacks up against the other ads in competition with yours.
Three significant factors decide an ad’s total value: (1) the bid, which is essentially how much money you are willing to place on your ad to reach your intended audience; (2) estimated action rates, or the likelihood an audience member will engage with your ad; and (3) ad quality, which is calculated from several different sources, such as how many people view or hide the ad. These factors help place your ad on a spectrum of relevance, and if its relevance is strong enough, it can still beat out ads with high bids.
Facebook offers a variety of tools to help you boost your ad’s total value, including ad relevance diagnostics and additional information regarding bids and their costs.
Using Your Facebook Business Page
Advertising on Facebook isn’t necessary for your business, but having and maintaining a business page for your company is. You should also keep your information up to date and add new content to keep it relevant. The purpose of having a Facebook page for your business is to connect with your current clients and create more opportunities for potential clients to see and become familiar with your pet care business. To that end, ensuring your page is well-kept and updated helps to increase your company’s visibility and gives an impression of accessibility and responsiveness that potential clients highly value. How often you want to post on your Facebook page or the extent to which you want to use it is ultimately up to you; however, after some trial and error, you’ll find the right strategy for your business. Just remember to keep posting all those cute pet photos – those sweet faces will do a lot of your work for you!
Until next time — happy pet sitting!
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