How Freelancers Can Use Facebook to Get New Clients

We all spend entirely too much time on Facebook. Imagine if you could make that time really count for something great. If you are a freelancer learn how freelancers can use facebook to get new clients and feel a little better about all that time you’re spending on Facebook.

Facebook is a powerful social media networking site, and the thing about networking is that it can be used to connect you to new people. When used correctly, freelancers can actually use Facebook to successfully find the clients of their dreams.

You won’t see find these mythical, unicorn clients just by posting updates about your Coke Zero on your personal profile, however; there needs to be a strategy involved in order to find, appeal to, and ultimately land those customers. In this post, we’ll show you how freelancers can use Facebook to get new clients, find the type of clients you’re looking for, and get them excited about what you do.

Set Up Your Facebook Page

In many cases, sticking to a single personal profile isn’t going to cut it if you want to network on Facebook. Instead, you need to create a professional, official Page for yourself or your business. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t network from your personal profile– you should when appropriate. Pages simply give potential clients a landing point and a way to learn more about who you are and what you do.

How Freelancers Can Use Facebook to Get New Clients

Your Page should contain links to your website and have either a professional headshot of you or of your branded logo as the profile picture. Include a description explaining what you do, and explain what makes you different. This will be an important part of not only attracting new clients alongside actually getting them interested.

Facebook has strong search engine functionality, and you should take search optimization into consideration when creating your content. You’d always target relevant SEO keywords for your site, right? Why not do the same for your social media content, too?

Try to include a few potential keywords in your profile’s description. If you’re a transcriptionist, for example, you could write “reliable transcription service with fast turn around.” In this case, “transcription service,” “reliable transcription service,” or “transcription service with fast turn around” are all things that people may be searching for.

Ideally, even your posts and video captions should be optimized for search. Do everything you can to maximize your reach, and it will be easier for potential clients to find you.

Ask Current Clients for Reviews

An enormous challenge freelancers face is proving themselves reliable and trustworthy to new clients. Freelancers in general are, after all, considered to be notoriously unreliable thanks to a small portion of people who don’t take it seriously.

Visible client reviews are the anecdote to this problem. 84% of potential customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from a friend, and 94.2% of customers surveyed said that they’d be more likely to purchase a product or service if they read a positive trustworthy review first.

How Freelancers Can Use Facebook to Get New Clients

Reach out to current clients and ask if they’d be willing to leave a review for you on Facebook. Many will say yes, particularly if they’ve been pleased with your work in the past.

If you don’t already have reviews enabled on your professional Page, head to your Page’s settings and then navigate to “Templates and Tabs.” Add the Review tab to your Page, and then turn the “Show Reviews” option on.

Share Content Your Audience Wants to See

Sharing content that your audience (aka potential clients) want to see is an important strategy. Too many people use Facebook as if it’s nothing more than their chance to say their piece. Instead of just spamming links to their own content, more Pages need to be sharing content their audience wants to see.

Social media timelines

This includes sharing actionable, interesting, valuable content that will benefit your audience, because this is what they’ll share in return. The posts don’t even have to be from you; you can share content created by an industry peer. Use this opportunity to build industry relationships. Not only are you giving your audience what they want to see without having to create it yourself, these same businesses may repay the favor at a later date.

How Freelancers Can Use Facebook to Get New Clients

When you share content that you haven’t created, always give a shout out to the original creator. This goes a long way in building goodwill with the other brand.

Boost Your Posts & Run Ads

Once your Page is up and running, you can use Facebook’s paid ad system to expand your reach quickly to find new clients.

You can boost posts to gain immediate visibility on organic content. In this case, you can use the social proof of likes, comments, and shares that already exist to your benefit to more quickly establish trust, because they’ll be visible on the sponsored post.

You can also run ad campaigns, either promoting organic posts or creating new ones. This option takes a little more time to set up, but it gives you more targeting options and you get greater creative control over the ad itself.

How Freelancers Can Use Facebook to Get New Clients

Either way, targeting will be key here. Consider who your audiences are, and how you might target them through the ad system. A good approach is to target based on their field of employment. A writer specializing in SaaS might try to target people who work in tech or business industries; a transcriptionist might target journalists, or attorneys who need a great deal of legal transcription work.

How Freelancers Can Use Facebook to Get New Clients

Facebook Ads can get expensive, so set a lifetime budget and a start and end date to your campaigns. By doing this, you’re less likely to accidentally overspend on pricey campaigns.

How Freelancers Can Use Facebook to Get New Clients

Leverage Your Network

Facebook is a social network, and you likely already have some valuable connections on the platform. Leverage this network to your benefit.

Reach out to followers and friends on both personal profiles and public Pages. Let them know when you’re running a special, launch a new service, or have room open in your schedule. Someone always knows someone who is looking for what you do, and most people love to help their friends out.

social media for job search

As long as you have the right content in place to show what you can do to people who want to check out the goods before committing, you’ll be golden.

Conclusion – How freelancers can use Facebook to get new clients

As a freelancer, it’s sometimes difficult to connect with clients if you’re looking for them in the same place hundreds of thousands of other freelancers are looking, too. Avoid getting stuck in this trap by taking things into your own hands, using Facebook to proactively create multiple touchpoints that can be used to find the exact clients you want and to create a long-lasting, valuable partnership that will benefit you both.

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