jeffkgross
Facebook marketing is today one of the most targeted ways of reaching your audience online. Being the social media with the largest audience and with a well laid out marketing platform, Facebook offers you an economically viable medium for marketing your business online.
One of the ways you can use Facebook to market your business on a shoestring budget is by creating a facebook fan page to promote your business. However, when marketing via social media, especially on sites like Facebook, it's important to remember a few key points.
The following Facebook marketing tips and tricks will help you better engage your audience in an effective way.
1. Update Your Fans Page on a Regular Basis
It is important to keep your facebook fan page active. One way of doing this is after you publish your blog posts or articles on your site, create a synopsis with links back to the original content for your Facebook page.
2. Stay Active by Engaging With Your Audience
This strategy should include replying to comments made or an feedback. Social media is all about connecting with others. Facebook marketing will tend to produce better results through a “conversation”.
3. Share Valuable Content with Your Audience
To gain a high level of respect as an “expert” in a given niche, it's important to add value, no matter where that value may come from. If there is a worthwhile post on a blog that doesn't belong to you, it may still be worth sharing. Making the posts all about you will tend to lose fans or have them unsubscribe you from their news feed.
4. Add Your Own Personality and Human Element to the Page
People don't want to interact with a “company” as much as they want to interact with another person. This is especially true for sites like Facebook. Your own individuality will earn you a higher level of trust.
5. Solicit feedback and testimonials
This will not only help you serve your customers better but also create more sales. If you will manage your reputation online with care getting testimonials will give your product or service the social proof it needs to increase sales.
6. Be Tactful When Dealing With Negativity
The inherent nature of large audiences includes a decent amount of negativity no matter how good the product or service really is. Avoid the negativity by working on positive solutions for your target audience and never lowering your standards to the level of someone looking to pick a fight.
7. Target Your Fan Page Posts
Use timing strategies to get your posts to your target audience when they are online or when they're most likely to have time to click through. This may be trial and error, but a good analytics package combined with a series of tests will give you some good background data to test further.
8. Don't Post Too Often
When the news feed of your fans or followers begins to have too many unsolicited messages, it will prompt action in the negative direction. 2 or 3 solid posts per day may produce better results than 5+ posts. This may depend on your audience and the level of engagement.
9. Provide Links to the Appropriate Places on Your “Money Site”
Having a twitter feed or giving your audience more places to connect with you will allow them to do this on their own terms. The same user that would unsubscribe from your Facebook on their “wall” would love to follow you via Twitter.
10. Avoid Excessive Automation
Just because you want to see it all doesn't mean everyone does. Too much too quickly also will kick in Facebook's own determination of what makes it onto the news feeds. Keep the updates manageable by personally reviewing what makes it onto your page and they're much more likely to go through.
11. Promote Offline
Take advantage of offline promotions through the use of business cards, bumper stickers or other promotional deals. If you have a product that has any custom labeling, this can be a great way to add your Facebook page web address. Exclusive deals or coupons can be offered as a method of getting people motivated to fan you on Facebook.
Marketing Take Away: These are only a few of the tips and tricks to setting up a successful Facebook presence. Testing and tracking will allow you to customize how you do things without sacrificing time and your personality while getting new customers for your business and making more sales.
Over to You: What social media marketing tactics are you deploying in your facebook fan page presently? Do you know of any challenges in using Facebook to angage with your customers? Share your experiences with us in the comments below.
That’s quite interesting. All the points you shared is quite rational. For me No. 4 points is worth a gold.
Agree with you Sanat. Without personality blogger will be just one of many, and that’s is not good. Trying to be different, and sometimes even controversial is good tactic for every blogger.
Such a nice article! There are really useful tips inside, I have been thinking about to make a facebook page to my blog, and your advices will help me to do it right! I would be glad to read about a similar process with the Google+ accounts.
Wow great post. But I have this one simple idea that I think might help also. That would be give some freebies 🙂 this works too.
Hi Nancy,
yeah…you’re right. People like to get something for free. Another great tip, thanks for sharing!
@Jeff Gross, hahaha lol! Most of the people today love free things. Including me 🙂
And you shouldn’t also forget about using all the ways to have good relationships and communication with your readers. For this purpose, it will be better to react somehow on all their comments, providing your readers with helpful information or giving them good advice
Facebook and other social networks are about people and we can use that to get traffic and publicity. It is very important to respond on comments and participate when other person have good initiative. Exactly that was a point of your comment. Thank you!
Nice thoughts.
I have a facebook page created for my small business.Its created two months back ,but i am unable to get any likes on my page.I do not know why people not liking my page.
Can you suggest the ways to start getting likes.
Hi Jeff,
Great post, thanks for those FB marketing tips.
I’ve always wondered what is the proper way to “connect” a blog to FB and Twitter, such that updates are current. Tried using OnlyWire but it doesn’t feel natural somehow.
Are there different things we should write on FB and tweet about such that they will fit that specific platform and how users interact with it, while at the same time maintain some form of “connection” with the post/story being put in the blog?
Writing a summary on FB is not difficult, but tweeting probably requires more creativity to capture followers’ attention. Any tips here would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again, Jeff.
@Mark,
Hi Mark, you may want to use “Simple Facebook Connect.” I use that on this blog and so far it has been working great. You can set it to automatically publish any post to your facebook page.
On selecting what to post to twitter and facebook, I think it is really a good idea to separate what you post to the two platforms as not everything you post to twitter will be good for your facebook page. I connected the two platforms sometime ago but I’ve discovered that most of the tweets appearing on the facebook page is not really worth it.
I think it is better to automatically send your facebook page posts to twitter but only post your tweets manually to facebook. This is to have control of what appears there.
I hope this is helpful.
Wow!
Great Stuff!
Simple yet very applicable!
Would love to read more of your articles!
@Barbie,
And I will glad to give you more! 🙂
Welcome Barbie, hope you signed up for the updates for that’s really how you can read more from me!
Facebook and social media marketing can make a lot of traditional marketers nervous. It’s true that it provides a great platform for interaction with your customers and a chance to get more personal with people. I think you’re right to advise keeping posting under control and to provide quality content in your chosen niche, even when it’s from another source.
Taking Facebook marketing and social media marketing in general seriously may be hard for some. But I think it’s an area that isn’t going away so for those who haven’t learned the ropes yet articles like these are tremendously helpful.
@Darci,
Good and insightful comment there Darci. Social media marketing is not going away any way it is going to be bigger and bigger! It may be intimidating right now for some folks but thanks for information like this, you don’t have to pay for them. Get the fundamentals and work with them but then if you want something deeper, then get help.
Facebook page is the best way to drive traffic for our website or blogs,we need to build some backlinks for our page nice tips you have give for the readers
I was more a twitter person so it took me sometime to understand the benefits of creating a facebook fan page. I think its a good way to market our business and at the same time increase traffic as well.
@Jesse McGreevy,
Combining facebook pages with twitter can really be very good for traffic. I think facebook pages are better when it comes to engaging with your target audience.
If only #8 were really simple to know ahead of time ….
I think apart from SEO, SMO is playing vital role to reach targeted audience online and that simply happens from Facebook. It’s the top and most used social media site in the entire world. One can drive good traffic if uses Facebook by following these simple but very effective strategies.
@bjohn,
Succeeding with Facebook definitely needs a good knowledge of seo and smo. Unfortunately, many marketers are not taking this into consideration.