~ by Haley Lynn Gray ~
Facebook is still where an enormous number of small businesses find clients, and it’s also where a lot of people get their accounts restricted for doing it badly.
Here’s what works, what gets you into trouble, and the one ratio that matters more than any tactic.
The ratio
If you take nothing else from this: for every promotional post, engage with other people at least five times. Daily.
Comment on their posts. Answer their questions. Congratulate them on things. Be present in a way that has nothing to do with selling.
I’ve seen significant growth in my own business from doing exactly this, and I’ve watched people fail at Facebook for years without ever trying it. Most people invert the ratio entirely — they post about their business and engage with nobody, then conclude the platform doesn’t work.
It works. They were broadcasting into a medium built for conversation.
Where to actually be
Groups are the strongest route, and the mistake is being in too many. People join twenty-five or thirty and are overwhelmed into doing nothing in any of them.
Be in three or four where your actual buyers are. Show up daily. Answer questions properly, including ones that have nothing to do with your service.
Here’s the thing that surprises people: even in groups where you can’t promote at all, if people know what you do, they will refer you. Somebody asks a question in your area, three members tag you, and you didn’t post a single promotional word. That’s the whole mechanism, and it only works if you’ve been present long enough for people to know.
Your business page is the official route and organic reach on pages has been poor for years. It still has uses — it’s where ads run from, it’s what people check when they’re deciding whether you’re real, and commenting on other pages as your page generates visibility.
Don’t build a strategy on page reach. Do keep the page complete and current, because people look.
Your personal profile is where most people actually get business, and it’s the one to be careful with. Using a personal profile primarily for business has long been against Facebook’s terms, and so has naming a profile after a business. Both can get accounts restricted, and the rules change — check the current ones rather than trusting a blog post, including this one.
The safer approach is a genuine profile that happens to include your work. Keep promotional content well under a third of what you post, and let the rest be an actual human being.
Private messages, done properly
Messaging can work extremely well and it’s where most people ruin their reputation.
The rule is simple: have a relationship before you pitch. Not a pretence of one — an actual exchange, over time, in which you’ve been a person rather than a funnel.
I once blocked someone who kept messaging me about how much I needed her services. She wanted $500 to turn my life around and help me lose weight, because apparently if I lost weight I’d be more successful.
That message told me everything about how she saw me: not as a person, as a prospect with a perceived deficiency she could sell against.
Beyond being unpleasant, it’s ineffective. And practically: enough blocks and reports will get your account shut down, which helps your business not at all.
What separates the people this works for
They’re specific about what they do. If your description could apply to anyone, nobody in a group will think to tag you. “I do bookkeeping for restaurants” gets remembered. “I help businesses thrive” doesn’t.
They’re consistently present rather than occasionally intense. Fifteen minutes daily beats two hours on a Sunday, because the algorithm and the humans both reward regularity.
They give away real information. Answering a question properly — including the part where you explain how someone could do it themselves — is the single most effective credibility-builder available. People consistently hire the person who showed them how rather than the person who said “DM me.”
And they follow up. Most conversations that could become work simply end, because nobody circled back. A polite message a fortnight later converts a meaningful share of people who were interested and got busy.
The things that get you nowhere
- Posting only about your business. You become someone people scroll past.
- Dropping links into groups without engaging. Group owners notice, and they’ll remove and block you.
- Adding people to groups without asking. Reliably irritating.
- Mass friend requests to strangers. Low acceptance, high report rate.
- And the “I see you’re a business owner, let me tell you about an opportunity” opener. Everybody recognises it.
The underlying thing
Getting clients on Facebook isn’t complicated. It’s about building relationships, and it’s far more effective to build solid ones with a few people than to spread yourself across thirty groups reaching nobody.
I’ve built a large following, and it started with focusing on each individual in front of me and treating them as a real person with real feelings — which is both the decent way to behave and, conveniently, the thing that actually works.
One caution worth stating plainly: platforms change their rules, their reach and their formats constantly, and any specific tactic here may be out of date by the time you read it. The ratio won’t be. Be useful five times for every time you ask for something, and most of the rest sorts itself out.
More on the wider process of getting clients and choosing where to be visible.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
