Chris Nelson, sales and promotion coordinator of Oregon's GoodLife Brewery, attended one of the Chamber's recent Facebook cross-country roadshows. At these events, Facebook experts meet directly with local businesses to discuss how to get the best results in connecting with customers on the social media outlet.

Social Media and Facebook can be slightly overwhelming for someone new to it, but the people at Facebook and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce helped simplify the process for small businesses last week in the mountain town of Bend, OR, during the Facebook Marketing Solutions seminar.

Congressman Greg Walden opened the seminar speaking about the importance of small businesses and how vital they are to the State of Oregon.  Working for a company that is less than a year old, GoodLife Brewing Company, means a lot of work with not a lot of workers.  For GoodLife Brewing Company, Facebook is proving to be a powerful tool. But how do you make it effective without it being a full time job?  It seemed everyone in attendance had this question, and the Facebook Marketing Solutions team had the answer—stay relevant and keep it simple.

The easiest way to stay relevant and keep it simple is monitoring your Insights to see which demographic is your biggest audience.  A few minutes of analyzing data gives you great insight when you should be posting.  Being a production brewery, we noticed people start thinking about beer mid-afternoon and now that is when we try to post.

Facebook is a powerful tool for small businesses to utilize and if Facebook Marketing Solutions comes to your city, I highly recommend attending.  It’s a free seminar and they even send you out the door with free ads to help get your name out there. 

When you’re a small business, tools like Facebook can make a real difference. We’re certainly hoping it helps increase the “likes” of GoodLife Brewing.