Just about any article on the basics of social media marketing will tell you one thing pretty early on – you need to have a Facebook page for your business. This, all social media experts ever will tell you, is up there with your Twitter account and your blog when it comes to promoting yourself on social networks. It is easy to set up, a breeze to manage and post on, and it’s free. So, why is it that so many small businesses, having enthusiastically taken this advice, find it so hard to get any people to like their page other than people they already know who they’ve begged to do it?
Here we take a look at how to run your Facebook page effectively.
How to Run Your Facebook Business Page Effectively
Before you can think about how to achieve your goals with your Facebook page, you need to know what those goals are. Perhaps you want hundreds or thousands of people in your local area to like the page for your shop, salon or bar, or you want mothers all over the world to like your line of baby products.
Chances are, you will have one goal pertaining to getting a lot of people from your target market to like your page and start seeing your posts. You will then have goals for your posts. Maybe you want to make sales with them, or maybe you simply want people to remain aware of your brand.
Maybe you want to disseminate news about what your business is doing (for example, if you have a band playing tonight in the pub you run, or an author doing a signing in your bookshop), so your ‘friends’ can spread the word. Establish what the goals are in terms of the people you need to attract and the content you want to post before you do anything else.
Let Your Facebook Page Be Interesting
Your Facebook posts, even when you have only a few ‘likes’ at the beginning, need to be interesting so people will read them and share them. Interesting can be many things – it could be a funny video if you are a light hearted sort of company, or a link to an article relative to your industry that people in your target market might find helpful. It could also, and this is one of the easiest ways to promote on Facebook, be a coupon or discount that people can only print out once they have liked the page.
As well as trying to make your content fun, useful or valuable enough to be shared, you can also get some new ‘friends’ by paying for some highly targeted Facebook advertising. This generally works out to be quite inexpensive and tends to (assuming your advertised offer is good) yield a very good return in terms of picking up new people to join your audience.
Some Facebook pages become an overnight success, whereas others increase slowly but surely in size over time. Do these things right, however, and you shouldn’t find yourself stuck with a page that only has your brother and his girlfriend as ‘friends’.
Contributor Adam Livermore is the marketing manager at Consult 3, a firm based in the UK that specializes in web technologies, online promotion, SEO and social media marketing. Adam is a social networking fanatic and loves writing about Facebook, as well as helping clients make the most of their Facebook accounts.
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