19 Facebook Post Ideas for Small Local Businesses

For small businesses, engaging with customers and potential customers via Facebook can be very rewarding. These interactions can help “humanize” your business as well as keep your name in front of fans and friends. The key to success is varying the types of content you post, so your audience looks forward to hearing from you.Remember, you’re reinforcing your brand but also building rapport you hope will lead to sales. That means Facebook posts should not necessarily be about your business, but they should always be relevant to your business.
Fresh out of ideas to keep your posts interesting?
Here are 19 tips that can work for many different types of small businesses. Keep your posts short but “pithy” — think in terms of providing useful information and, whenever possible, starting a conversation, so you can earn likes, shares and comments. And more fans and customers or clients or patients.
- Hold a contest. If you have a landscape company, ask customers to share photos of their garden and ask people to vote for their favorites with “likes.” Don’t forget to reward the winner with a discount or some other simple but meaningful prize.
- Share results of your contests, by posting the name and picture of the winner(s) so they get exposure, too.
- Ask for advice. Everyone loves to be asked their opinion, and their answers could have practical value for you and others fans, too. Ask whether you should add a particular new product or service, remodel your bar or how they would solve some other challenge you’re facing with your business.
- Turn the tables and invite fans to “ask the expert,” posing questions for you to answer. You can share your knowledge and build credibility in a fun way. Collect questions and responses over time and publish them as premium “things you’ve always wanted to know” content.
- Tie your posts to the seasons or holidays.
- Occasionally post something personal about yourself. It could be a photo of you and your dog Sadie hiking with your shop’s latest outdoor gear, or it could be purely for fun – a shot of that nice fish you caught on your vacation.
- Share photos or video links that show you or your employees in action on the job. Everyone loves a behind-the-scenes glimpse.
- Or post photos of your team volunteering at a community event.
- Better yet, post ahead of time asking Facebook fans to join you in volunteering and to take photos to share while they’re there.
- Take a poll, using Facebook’s free poll app. Ask for suggestions on how to improve your store, or ask for top reasons to use your pool service rather than having to do the work themselves.
- Share poll results, too. Depending on the topic, you can use the information as the basis for a blog article or even premium content such as a tip sheet or e-book.
- Post a quote of the day, or the week. Mix them up, so they are sometimes wise, sometimes inspiring, sometimes funny. Note which types get shared most often.
- Ask fans to share their favorite quotes.
- Post a “heads up” about your latest postcard marketing campaign, so fans keep a sharp eye on their mailbox for your special offer.
- Post a statement that requires people to fill in a blank. My favorite day of the week to eat out is ____.
- Ask customers to share photos of themselves using your products or services or eating in your restaurant, then let your fans vote for their favorites with “likes.”
- Link to how-to videos posted on your website or YouTube.
- Offer a discount every now and then, exclusively for fans.
- Team up with another business to cross-post about one another — promote each other’s products or services, share content, tag each other in your posts.
Which of these Facebook post ideas will you use first?