When it comes to Facebook, the majority of small businesses tend to run their page themselves. This usually entails the business owner putting together a quick post of an evening after their work day. Mainly because they feel that is what they should be doing.

Although this can generate some fantastic results, inevitably, some mistakes are made which could be costing them customers. During our years of experience with working with businesses to improve their marketing efforts, we’ve noticed a few Facebook mistakes small businesses make.

The fact is, 56% of Facebook users go to the platform for information and 78% of US consumers discover retail products to buy on Facebook. Your small mistakes could be preventing those users from choosing your business over your competitor.

If you find that you’re making the mistakes mentioned, it’s worth spending time rectifying them. Don’t worry, we are here to help!

1. Broken link to your website

The chances are you’ve worked really hard to create a website that you’re proud of, or you’ve paid someone a lot of money to make you a website you’re really proud of. Which is why it’s crucial that customers can visit it. 
There have been many instances where we’ve tried to click on the link to the business’ website through the about section on their page and been greeted with a 404 error message – a huge red flag for a potential customer. Research has shown that there’s about an 8 second window to capture someone’s attention and a 404 error message is going to make them drop off. So double check that all the links on your Facebook page work. Although this may seem like a very small thing, around 5% of visitors to your site will buy from you.

2. Irrelevant message prompts

A great tool that Facebook introduced for businesses is the capability to have frequently asked questions, or question prompts on Facebook messenger. Having these on your page encourages people to ask you the questions you’ve suggested and can kickstart that conversation between you and the customer. 

Having said that, Facebook does auto-populate these questions which can make them irrelevant to your customers. This, in turn, actually discourages them from sending you a message. For example; a property maintenance company may have estate agent questions auto-populated because the Facebook AI has just recognised the word property. 

Making sure that the auto-populated questions are relevant to your business is important as people are 53% more likely to buy from a business using live chat. So encouraging them to take that first step in messaging you could win you the business. 

It’s easy enough to set up these questions yourself in just four steps:

  1. Go to your business page and head to ‘Messenger tools’ in the left-hand side column
  2. Once in the Messenger settings, you’ll see there’s a to-do list section which lists the things you haven’t done yet. As you haven’t set up the questions, you should be able to click the ‘Set Up Now’ button
  3. You should now be in the Meta Business Suite. From here, navigate to the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section from the left-hand side column
  4. From there, you can click the ‘Add Another Question’ button

Inconsistent posting

There’s a saying that success is 5% brains and 95% consistency and this is partly the case for Facebook posts. Although there are other factors too, such as the time posts are published and the content within them, consistency is very important. 

As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, business owners often hastily put together Facebook posts in the evening after a day’s work. This isn’t a consistent way of working and results in less reach and potentially less customers. 

A good way to combat this problem is to only commit to the number of posts you can truly do. If that’s only one a week that’s completely fine. Try to avoid doing three or four one week and then only one the following week. Instead, schedule those posts to spread them out; which you can do within Facebook. Suddenly, you have five weeks of consistent content rather than two weeks of inconsistent content. 

By rectifying these small mistakes, you could be generating more leads and, in turn, getting more customers. Looking for more helpful blog posts? Explore our searchable blog for more top tips.


If you’re still struggling with making your Facebook page work for your business, give our friendly team a call on 01903 686858 to find out how we can help.