If you are using Facebook as a marketing tool for your small business, you will know that the main reason for using Facebook is to build and engage your companies fan base.
And whilst that sounds easy, gaining fans are much harder to come by as people become overloaded with information.
So to get and more importantly keep fans, you need to engage your community and provide them with relevant and useful information that has them wanting more.
I want to share you a few tips to engage your community.
Give people a reason to join your page
The first step is of course to get your fans and the easiest way to do that is with a branded welcome tab. A fantastically branded welcome page that entices people to join the page works wonders. Not only does it ensure consistency through out your branding it also increases the chance of people liking your page.
There are so many things you can do on the welcome page, such as embedding a video welcome, adding in a sign up form (where you can collect their email addresses).
Some companies entice people to like the page with what is known as a Reveal Tab. Where you offer people ‘exclusive’ information if they like your page. When someone lands on the welcome tab (and they have not liked your page) they see one page and then when they actually click LIKE they then receive access to a new page with a free download or similar (which is known as the reveal tab).
The Facebook page North Social is a great example of this
Listen and RESPOND to your fans
Now you have your fans you want to make sure you keep them and by listening and engaging with your fans is the best way.
For example if you have posted out a question on Facebook and people have responded, make sure you respond. An active page entices new people visiting to join the page.
If your page has questions or comments on there it looks like you don’t care about what your fans have to say and also that you don’t use the page very often.
I saw a great example of a Tony Bianco Shoes interacting with a fan who asked a question. The client wanted to find a pair of shoes in her size, and they have responded and are going to try and source her a pair.
This was a really simple but effective way to engage and respond to your clients. You have a very happy customer who will no doubt tell all their friends about how impressed they were at your service. The best thing it doesn’t take any effort to do this except for your time.
Share Content and Information
Sharing is caring. Use your status updates to share information and content to your fans. The information needs to be relevant to the message you want to portray but you can also have some fun with it. The key to being successful on Facebook is being consistent.
The key to updates and sharing content is to not always promote your business. By all means share your blog posts and news updates but also break it up by sharing information from other sources that your fans would be interested in.
The reason for doing this is to provide value to your fans, whilst not over-promoting your business. You are still out in front of everyone and putting your company at front of mind but people wont feel like you are constantly selling to them.
People will be following you as they expect certain information from you, so make sure that is what you are delivering to them is relevant to your business.