If you have a business you will understand the importance of promoting it through different channels. By utilising media such as Twitter and Facebook, besides the many other traditional methods, you are able to reach a much wider and varied audience and you have the ability to make your communication interactive.
When setting up your Facebook page you need to include the usual points about your business; what it is you do, how you can be contacted and a cover photo or logo that represents your company, when this is done you can start ‘actively recruiting’ likes and friends.
So what is the best way to go about doing this? Well, you can;
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Invite people, via your email contacts either as a group or individually, to like your page
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You can like other peoples’ pages with the hope they will like yours back…
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Make suggestions to friends using the feature of the same name
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Share updates
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Tag people and pages
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Always post engaging information, ditties, photos and features
“Over one billion people like and comment an average of 3.2 billion times every day. When you have a strong presence on Facebook, your business is part of these conversations and has access to the most powerful kind of word-of-mouth marketing — recommendations between friends.” Source: Facebook
With likes and friends in the bag you next need to consider what information you want to give your audience and how best to convey it.
Facebook is a communication channel and allows you the opportunity to be fun and professional, a mix that is usually reserved for corporate days out and office parties…(?). You are giving an impression of your company and therefore your brand and values should be reflected in all posts you make. Perhaps the most important section on any Facebook user’s page is the News Feed. This is where stories from people and pages that you follow get updated and can include status updates, newly posted photos or links and likes. Visibility of these updates can be changed by using the news feed control setting which allows you to see the most relevant stories. Facebook uses different factors to establish which stories reach the top spot so always try and include videos and pictures, and encourage some serious commenting action from your friends.
Just recently Facebook has changed its rules on running competitions, which is a tried and tested method for interaction and gaining new ‘customers’ or friends. Whereas before you used to have to use third party apps to host competitions you can now collect entries by having users like a page or comment, or message a competition page. This makes it really easy for small businesses to host contests and competitions without the pressure of cost, resources or time.
Engagement is the key here, you are giving your fans a reason to interact with you whilst promoting your company at the same time. Your page is also getting its share of the limelight and is likely to attract more fans which you can then turn into regular contributors to your page or, better still, customers.
That final point takes me onto the topic of next week’s blog; Advertising on Facebook. I would very much like to hear about your experiences of Facebook advertising…Do you think it works? Do you take notice? What has been your most successful experience with Facebook so far?
Feel free to click on one, or all, of the social media icons at the top right of this post and let the ladies at Debut Marketing know your thoughts.
P.S. As I had no response to my interactive feedback request last week, if you have read this far it has now become compulsory for you to comment this week.