Just because you’re adding more friends to your Facebook page doesn’t mean your marketing strategy is working. If you’re not having meaningful discussions with your friends, networking, and meeting clients as a result, you’re not using Facebook as well as you could be. This free tool has the potential to help you connect with clients around the world, but you need to learn how to actually use your Facebook page as more than just a place to feel popular and liked.
Get Others to Like You
Okay, it’s true – you do need to build up the friends on your business page if you want to increase your odds of seeing value from your Facebook account. There are a number of ways you can do this. The most obvious way is to suggest the page to all of the friends you already have. This will encourage them to sign up to receive updates from you and this will help to encourage others to see what your page is about. After all, if someone’s friend ‘liked’ your page, another person in his or her friends list might ‘like’ you too. Every week, you can suggest to your new friends to add you to their account. You do need to build up your numbers, but it’s not just a numbers game.
Have Something to Say
When you’re using your Facebook page, you need to look at this as an ongoing discussion with the people who are linked to you. As a result, you need to have something to say – and something of value to say. This is where knowing your brand strategy comes in handy. If you’re selling yourself as a snarky housewife, you need to make sure that your posts are written in that style and that they are boosting the market you’re involved in. Each day, you will want to post something, anything, that relates to your audience and to the business you want to promote. This might include links to news articles about your market or it might be status updates from you about your life, if that’s a part of your brand.
80/20 Rule
While you might be tempted to talk about just yourself, that’s not going to win over your Facebook friends. You need to spend 80% of your time sharing valuable things with your friends – interesting articles (that you didn’t write), links to news stories, status updates about your life, etc. – and you need to spend the other 20% of your time promoting what you have to promote. This way, you’re not overwhelming your friends and you’re still marketing, subtly.
Valuable Friends Add Up
Yes, the friends you know matter. You can’t just add any friends and think you’re going to get some value out of them. At first, you might just add everyone you know, but when you begin to refine your Facebook page, it’s time to seek out friends who are actually going to add value. This might mean that you join groups on Facebook who are related to your market and then slowly increase your friends from there. The more you connect with people, the more your business will be visible, but adding friends who are already interested in what you have to say is a better use of your time.
Facebook also offers you the opportunity to promote your business page by paying for ad space. But you will find that most of the time, the strategies above help you to connect with others who can then connect you to profitable ventures and golden opportunities. And who doesn’t ‘like’ that?
Matthew Toren is an Award Winning Author, Serial Entrepreneur, and Investor. He Co-Founded YoungEntrepreneur.com along with his brother Adam. Matthew is co-author of the newly released book:Small Business, Big Vision: “Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right” and also co-author of Kidpreneurs.
Good summary. I would think the same goes for Twitter as well, although some of the mechanics are different (followers join for different reasons than people friend or like businesses) as are the rules of engagement (what is acceptable on the less-personal Twitter may seem a bit cold on FB).
I feel that Facebook marketing is more suited for a brick-and-mortar business and Twitter is better suited to an online-only business. This may be because the general type of people that join FB are more interested in connection than the people who sign onto Twitter, but I do feel the two platforms are suited for slightly different things.
Have to agree. I see so many businesses using their Facebook page to just spam their fans. It is no surprise to commonly see pages with 2,000+ fans struggle to get a like or a comment.
Valuable advice, however, may be difficult to implement for people (like myself) who do not have a personal account on Facebook. I only have a business profile on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Raf-Buycom/171756846189568 .
With regards to John’s comment, myself, as a newbie to social media marketing I cannot see a particular value in having a Twitter account for your business. Many times I have been thinking about setting an account on Tweeter, however, ultimately I chose Facebook, as I thibk it will prove more beneficial….
If the business involves services in the internet it is best to market worldwide since anything is in reach. There would be easy communication through chat or internet calls. Great tips and I hope internet businesses would not restrict themselves locally.
Excellent practices for networking online all together, maybe not the same terms, but the same results if you stick to it.
got of fans doesn’t mean success in marketing. Because think properly , all of your fans, how much many percentage of it is your real customers, how many fans do interest with your product? Or they join you just for winning the contest prize? But we do need lot of fans , we can use contest or all kind of marketing methods to get more fans but do not go and buy fans. You will regret because most of it is bolt which Facebook will auto delete it .
Building a Facebook page will create brand awareness and also help with your ranking in the search engines. Amazing Strategies.. Thanks.