In Part 2 of my “Using Facebook for Business Series” I will provide ideas and resources for implementing your business’ content strategy.
How will you attract new fans and engage existing fans?
1. Promoting Your Page
The tricky thing about Facebook Pages is that you can’t friend someone the way you can from your profile. People can elect to become fans of your Page, but only if they know about it. So you’ve got to spread the word organically (and keep doing it) to introduce people to your Page and to your company.
First identify contacts from your personal profile that are either business connections, people working in a field related to your business, or who would otherwise benefit from the information your company provides, and invite them to become a fan of the Page. Send a short note explaining what you want to offer from the Page (remember, people are thinking “what’s in it for me?”) and include a link to the Page.
Next, promote your Page elsewhere online by putting a Facebook Page button on your website to help others find it, spreading the word on Twitter if you’re there, sending out an email notification, or putting a link on your business cards. Do whatever it takes to help people know that you’re on Facebook and you want them to become a part of your community. Don’t forget to tell them WHY to come…but that will come later in this article.
2. Defining a Content Plan
What will you post? How often? This is so important to do up front, becuase as I’ve mentioned in Part 1 of this series, THE PRIMARY WAY YOUR FANS WILL ENGAGE WITH YOU IS VIA NEWS FEED. If you are serious about this effort then take the time to set a plan. This will change and evolve as you monitor your response, interactions and (hopefully) new business leads.
What Kind of Content? This is dependent on your business. If you are an affinity brand like a radio station, then it’s easy to post content about your events, your content, your staff because people want to hear all about you … they feel like part of your community. Pest Control, Accounting, Real Estate…well, it might take a little more work to come up with an effective plan for content management.
Encourage discussion among fans by asking questions like: “what’s your favorite product?” or “what could we do to improve our product?” Post updates weekly, if not daily and point your fans to any off-site promotions, such as giveaways hosted on different web sites.
And keep it fun! Nobody likes straight up business all the time! Zappos, for example, has crazy videos and posts that aren’t related to shoes, which is why their fan base is well over 21,000.
It will take time to build your fan base, so remember to keep sending out invites to new contacts asking if they want to become a fan of your business Page. Constantly promote the Page in any way possible, and keep your content fresh — give people a reason to check in on your page regularly.
Check your analytics: before long you should see a large portion of your website’s referrals coming from Facebook!
How Often Should I Post? This is also not cut and dried. If you are posting entertainment stories you are posting once a day if not more. If you are posting tax tips, then you want to keep frequency low. Start at once a week and monitor response. I’m not saying you can only post once a week, I’m saying keep your tax tips or car sale information to a minimum. Post relevant news stories, fun tips, or anything related to your business category that is more light hearted.
Defining a publishing schedule for your content
This isn’t really a tip, but more of a best practice. By creating a calendar to guide your updates, you will achieve the following benefits:
1. You can spread updates out so that you carry on a persistent but unobtrusive dialog with your Fans. Post too often and your page updates will start being hidden, or you’ll lose fans. Too seldom and you’ll be forgotten. Try to mix up different update types – a status update, a Link, a Note, a Photo or video update.
2. By creating a calendar, you can also schedule moderation periods for comments if you feel this is necessary for your brand. Most Interaction activity (including comments) will occur within 24 hours of an update before it drops out of Fans’ news feeds.
3. By recording all activity on a schedule, it’s easier to map it against exported stats data from your page’s Insights. This can show you Total Interactions around different content types to gauge which gets the most traction/conversation, and track Removed Fans against certain update types.
Overall, just get started by doing something … even if it’s only once a week. You’ll be a social media whiz before you know it.
I recommend the following website for more learning, http://www.mashable.com.
