Facebook Marketing is an essential part of Digital Marketing for any small to medium business owners. While, everyone believes in setting up websites for the online audience, a lot of us do not capitalise on the benefits of social media. With Valentine’s Day around the corner, it’s the right time to do Facebook Marketing.

Here are 3 tips to do effective Facebook Marketing for Valentine’s Day

1. Optimise your Facebook Page

Make sure your Facebook page is set up the right way. It should have an SEO friendly description. Your About section should have all of your details. A Valentine’s Day relevant cover image design (with maximum 20 per cent text) should be updated. Your cover image can include details of an offer or contest you’re running or planning to run for Valentine’s Day. To make sure your cover image meets the required guidelines visit the Facebook Cover image grid. You should also plan your content for the week leading up to Valentine’s Day with wishes, offers and contest posts (if any) and Pin them to top, so that they are the first post any visitors or fans view when they land on your Facebook page.

2. Run Valentine’s Day Contests

Contests are one of the best ways to engage your online audience. Everyone loves freebies and Valentine’s Day is a special time to share the joy. However, before deciding which kind of contest you want to run, you should be sure of which marketing objective you want to achieve.

Photo Contest

You can run Valentine’s day photo contests to gain brand popularity and fans. Some suggestions for contest ideas are: Couple photographs, Valentine’s Day gift, Best time ever and more.

Caption Contests

You can use caption contests to increase the awareness of your brand, get positive feedback from fans, and increase fans. Suggested contest ideas are: Would you be our Valentine? (Tell us why!). If you’ve got a merchandise business – then you can ask your fans to share what would they like to gift their girlfriends or boyfriends this Valentine day from your products – and you can send those products as gifts to the lucky winners as well.

Timeline Contests

You can run Timeline contests to get higher per post interaction, and brand loyalty to get the attention of your audience. Suggested Timeline contest idea: If you’ve got a restaurant, you can put up a status update that says, “Book a table for your free valentine’s day romantic dinner. Share with us why you want to spend your special date with us, tag your better half and get maximum interaction.” Maybe you can select 14 lucky winners who get to dine at your restaurant that evening. And these fans can become your future brand advocates who will spread the word about how awesome you are!

Make sure you support these contests with Facebook ads and you can easily achieve your desired marketing objective.

3. Sell Valentine’s Day gifts on Facebook

For any business, Valentine’s Day is a great time to increase their sales. There are all sorts of gifts – custom and branded that are on sale. Flowers, cakes, dresses, accessories, short getaways and romantic meals. If your business supports any of the mentioned products or services then you must use Facebook Page to reach out to your customers. Why should you miss out on active Facebook audience? You should sell on Facebook by setting up a Facebook Shop, giving away Valentine’s Day Coupons or Group Deals on Facebook, even rewarding your fans instantly for simply interacting with your Facebook Page.

Ritika Verma is a Social Media Manager with Apps Mav. You can get in touch with me to help you with Facebook campaign management. Follow us on @appsmav.