How to Optimize Your Facebook Profile for Lead Gen

When you're in a personality-intense business like coaching or consulting, your Facebook Profile is one of your biggest assets. A well-optimized Facebook Profile helps you connect with ideal clients, start conversations, and show up with authority. The problem is that most coaches using Facebook to attract clients and generate leads haven't optimized their profile to maximize results.

In this episode, I talk about how to set up your Facebook Profile for business, so you can maximize results and leverage it for lead generation.

Here's some of what I answer in this episode:

• Why use a Facebook Profile instead of a proper Business Page
• Which old posts and photos to delete...and which to keep
• How to make sense of which features to use, and which to ignore (Facebook Stories, live videos, pinned posts, reels, etc.)
• The most common mistake that pretty much shoots yourself in the foot

 Hello, and welcome to the Client Attractor Show. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, client attraction coach and author of the brand new book Client Attractor. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or clientattractorbook.com.  

Today's topic is Facebook, or more specifically, your Facebook profile. If you're not already using your personal Facebook profile in your business, if that's not currently part of your marketing strategy, you may have noticed that, specifically with coaches and consultants these days, that a lot of people are using their Facebook profile. And so the first thing I want to do is answer the question of why that's the case. 

The short answer is that Facebook is a corporation. And Facebook as a corporation wants to maximize its revenue, right, because they want to make more money. So back in 2018, a lot of entrepreneurs and businesses were really getting a lot of traction with their Facebook business pages. When they posted on those business pages, it got in front of a lot of people, and they got a lot of business from it. And Facebook's reaction was to actually change the algorithm for those business pages, so that the organic reach of those pages was dramatically reduced. 

So that's why if you have tried to create your own business page in the past few years, and you've gotten discouraged because it's showing that you have hundreds of likes, but maybe nine people actually see your post, and no one likes the post, well, that's because of this 2018 algorithm change that Facebook made. And the reason they made it was so that these businesses would pay to boost their posts, would pay for Facebook ads, and instead of taking an organic approach, move to a paid advertising approach.  

And this change had really, really devastating effects for a lot of business owners who were really depending on the organic reach of their Facebook business page, and a lot of these businesses in question really didn't have it in the budget to start shelling out hundreds or even thousands of dollars every month on Facebook ads. Their business model was just not set up to accommodate that added expense as well as the idea of Facebook ads in a lot of ways. Being something of a gamble, sometimes where you don't know, if you put $1,000 whether you're going to get $2,000 back or none at all. 

The big change that happened in response to that is a lot of small business owners—more specifically, business owners who are really in a personality based business—their business depended on the business owner’s personality. So coaches, consultants, people like that, they started transitioning into using their personal Facebook profiles for their business, so that they could start to get some of that organic reach back that they lost in that really massive 2018 algorithm change. 

That shift from the business page to the profile also really necessitated a lot of strategy changes, because the way that you used to be able to get organic reach through a business page was very different than how you can now get organic reach and engagement through a personal profile, so a lot of people are really depending on their personal profiles as the main source of their social media organic traffic, at least as far as Facebook goes. 

Before I start talking more about the best practices for optimizing your own Facebook profile for your business, I do want to give a big, big, big disclaimer that using your Facebook personal profile for your business—so using it instead of a business page—is very, very clearly against Facebook's Terms of Service. Now the extent to which Facebook enforces that is questionable and often debated. But before you go into this, you should know that it is against their terms of service, and technically, you do risk having your Facebook account shut down. So I will leave it to you to make that decision of whether the risk is worth it for you. But ultimately, that's a decision that you're going to have to make about the level of risk that you are comfortable with. 

 And with that, let's go ahead and get into the process of how to optimize your Facebook profile for your business. So what I'm going to share with you today is a list of mistakes that I have put together, based on things that I have either done myself or really consistently seen other people do. I will share a little bit about the mistake and then ultimately give you what I recommend doing instead. 

So first off, and this is probably one of the biggest mistakes that I see on a daily basis, is that when you're setting up your profile for your business, you're sanitizing it beyond recognition. I see a lot of people who are in the process of setting up their profile really just scraping back everything, sanitizing it, of their entire personality. And the thought process behind this tends to be something like, “Well, I need to make sure that everything is on brand. I need to make sure that this 100% reflects my business instead of my personal life,” and so people are going through and deleting family photos or social posts that aren't related to their work, and what they're left with is this bare social media profile that really only focuses on their business and nothing else.  

And that might be okay for a business page, because the focus of our business page is entirely on the business. However, with your profile, it's your name that's at the top of the screen; it is still your name, and it is still a personal profile, no matter how much you're using it for your business or not. And when you sanitize it beyond recognition and remove, really, any instance of showing that you're human, it comes across to your ideal client as kind of unnatural, because when they logged on to your profile, people are really looking, not just for your business stuff, but they're trying to get a sense of who you are as a person. 

That's even more important for coaches and consultants, because this is such a personality-driven business, and at the end of the day, your clients aren't going to want to be coached by or do business with some nameless, faceless business. They want to work with a real-life person, and so what you really need to do is make sure that your profile, at the end of the day, shows who you are, includes those family photos, includes some statuses that don't have anything to do with your business, but really shows who you are and, at the end of the day, that you're human. 

Part of this is really, really good news, in fact, because it means that you don't have to make sure that everything is perfect. You don't have to spend the hours scrubbing your Facebook profile of really any semblance of who you are privately. Now, of course, you do probably want to take down, you know, drunk photos of you in college or maybe those unnecessarily aggressive or mean-spirited political posts, if you have those up. Those are examples of things that you probably do want to get rid of. But it means you don't have to get rid of the family photos or get rid of anything else that shows who you are. 

So, if the first big mistake is around hiding your personality, the second one is around how you're actually making use of your Facebook profile and its features. So, for example, your profile really needs to be scrollable, and what I mean by that is that it needs to not just be a bulk of text. People who scroll down your profile, if they just see these big blocks of text, one right after the other, they're really not going to stop and engage or anything, because your profile is not consumable. 

So that means, on an ongoing basis, to be intentional about not just posting one type of content, so making sure that you're posting some photos, some text posts, some videos, things like that, so that your profile is scrollable and consumable. 

And then, of course, you really want to take advantage of the core features available to view on your Facebook profile, and this is something that a lot of people really resist. For example, when stories first made their way to Facebook a while back, a lot of people were laughing and scoffing and saying, “That's a stupid feature. I don't see how it'll help my business.” And cool, it doesn't matter if you think it's a stupid feature. The reality is that a lot of people on Facebook are using it; they are watching stories. And that means that if you're not using them, in this example, you are not getting in front of all of these people who are spending time scrolling through people's Facebook stories. 

The second reason to take advantage of all the features, so of stories, and particularly in this example, is that when Facebook introduces a new feature, they really want people to use that feature, and what they do to make that happen is they really incentivize people to post stories, or reels, or live videos, or whatever, by favoring them in the algorithm. 

For example, if you post a video on Facebook, so you record a video and you upload it, you'll get some views, you'll get some engagement, but nothing to write home about. On the other hand, if you go live on Facebook, Facebook will send out notifications to all your friends and connections, saying, “Hey, so-and-so is live on Facebook right now,” to really get as many people as possible to log into Facebook and look at your live video. And then, once the live video is over and it's just kind of living on your profile for the rest of eternity, Facebook still incentivizes people to watch that by making that live video recording show up way more often in people's newsfeeds. 

Facebook really wants you to use its newest and latest and greatest features that it introduces, so you really want to take advantage of these for the algorithm benefits if absolutely nothing else. This means that you really just need to be using all of the features you can get your hands on: upload that cover photo, put that bio, make sure you have your website links up, pin a post to the top of your profile to give an overview of what you do, post to your stories, make live videos—whatever features Facebook is promoting and using at the moment. Those are the features that you want to be using too. 

The last tip that I will share with you today to conclude today's episode is that you want to make your Facebook profile public. You want to make it so that anyone in the world, on or off Facebook, can see your profile, see your profile photo, see your posts. And the reason to do that is exactly what you might think it is, which is so that people can view your profile. It may seem really obvious to you, but I see this mistake happening often enough that I think it's still worth mentioning, because if you're using your Facebook profile for really any sort of business purpose, it does need to be public. Otherwise, you're really just shooting yourself in the foot. 

You wouldn't add a password to your website or restrict your Facebook business page to only be viewable by certain people. That's the same exact concept here. So even if you're fairly certain that your profile is set to public, go and double-check, because oftentimes, I find that a lot of people think their profile is set to public, when in fact it's not. So even if you're 100% sure, just go and check to be on the safe side, because worst case scenario, if you log in and it's exactly set the way you think it is, you've wasted like 10 seconds, and I'm sorry to waste that 10 seconds, but hey, at least now you're 200% sure. 

Again, thank you so, so much for joining me for today's episode of the Client Attractor Show. Really appreciate you joining me here today, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for our next episode. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, and have a really great day.