Facebook search has location priotized results. This makes it easier for people in your location to find you – meaning more relevant leads too your page.
Users who like or share your content help to promote your information. This effectively turns your audience into salespeople – marketing your information to their friends and family (people are a lot more open to the advice or testimonials of someone they know rather than a hired salesperson from your company.)
You don’t need to invest thousands of dollars a month and hire a company to manage your social media. If you are reasonably confident online. With some basic training and advice you will be able to manage your Facebook page
Be Social, don’t sell.
People use Facebook to catch-up with friends and family, play games, or read entertaining or interesting content. Most users are browsing in the evenings or during breaks. When people are in this social mood they do not respond well to being ‘sold’. Try to avoid direct sales promotions as much as possible – unless that is the #1 reason people follow you (e.g. online shop, daily discounts etc.) Try building a community of people rather than just a one sided conversation.
Build interaction: encourage feedback, questions and discussions from your Facebook community. Create engagement with competitions or games. This can be something simple from “like this photo to win” or “guess how many items in this jar”. It could also be something more complex such as a custom app e.g. “upload a photo of you using our products to win” or “design your own T-shirt to win”. Apps and competitions give people incentives to engage with you, and when they do they help spread the word and promote your page to their friends. This is an effective way of building your audience and extending your reach on Facebook.
Experiment.
Find out what content your audience likes most. Try using different styles of images and see how your audience responds. Do you get more engagement with serious, professional images? Or are humorous and relaxed images getting more attention?
Monitor your activity and audience reactions. Facebook insights are useful for seeing how people engage with your content. It is important to always monitor how effective your posts are and to find out what content people like most. You need to adapt to your audience, and this may mean adjusting your strategy a few times. Trends change and its important to make sure you keep posting what people are interested in. Insights can provide other useful information such as: when your audience is online – telling you the optimum time for new posts.
Scheduling posts makes it easy to write posts in advance and publish them at specific times. This is great if your audience is active late nights and weekends.
Building your audience on Facebook can be hard. It can be helpful to think of the reasons why people like pages or companies on Facebook.
- To gain access to exclusive content, events or sales
- To receive discounts or promotions
- Get updates about your company or products
- Want be associated with the company/page
- Want to receive relevant industry news/current events
- To interact with the company -e.g. support
- To interact with other audience members – community forum, like minded people
These are just a few of the reasons people like pages on Facebook, it can be helpful to think of these and see which of these might be expectations your customers have about your company. It is worth exploring these different content types to see what people engage with most.
Benefits of being active on Facebook
If you invest a bit of time with your company Facebook page, your efforts will be rewarded with an active following of people who are interested in what you do.
Free feedback. Feedback from your customers can be extremely valuable. It gives you an opportunity to hear what people think about your products or services, you can use them as a test audience to see what they think about potential new products
A well managed Facebook presence can be great for your business – and is often something that can be easily maintained in-house with some basic advice and training. Contact our team today to help get the most out of your online presence.
To apply this to your business – Do you have a product or service that deals with problems your customers are having? If the content on your website is always talking about your product, but not what your product does or how it can be used to solve specific problems then chances are you are missing out many leads from people who need your product or service – they just don’t that it is you who has the solution they need. Think about how someone would find you if they didn’t know what you did or sold. Think backwards.
Rewarding viewers for their loyalty with exclusive information or advice creates lasting relationships with viewers and gives them a reason for going back to your website. Creating a resource library of useful links, advice, eBooks and other useful resources are a great way of making your website the go-to place for your viewers.
A blog, news feed or advice column for getting people to come back to your website – Even if information is not the primary purpose of your website, It can be a method of getting people there who can then be open to seeing the primary reason for your website – e.g. sales or interaction.
A forum can be time consuming to manage – but extremely rewarding for building a very loyal community of returning viewers. Forums can be perfect for informative websites where opinions or advice is encouraged by viewers. A forum can also be effective for managing support enquiries, event information and other open or closed group discussions.
Social media can be a great way of communicating with your customers. Offering exclusive offers or advertising new products, events or advice is a great way to increase your community presence.
Email newsletters can be an effective way to inform viewers of changes to your website such as – new products, sales /promotions and events.
This determines how well you show up in search engines. This is decided by a few factors; some of this is determined by the way the website is built and indexed. Another important factor for SEO is content. It is always important to include well written content and relevant images in your website, with a focus on keywords for your industry – If your website does not say, “We offer affordable kitchens in Hamilton, New Zealand” how will people (or search engines) know that you do? Updating the content regularly helps too; this is why we often suggest a blog or news feed. Search engine algorithms are always changing and updating so it’s important to maintain your website and keep up with the latest standards.
Google Adwords and online advertising can be effective at generating leads particularly in industries where keywords are in competition.
The digital world has provided us with many great ways to advertise and promote, but let’s not forget the ways of old. Print design is still an effective medium for communication – Newspaper advertising, flyers posters and billboards can be a great way to promote your business and especially effective when used in as part of an all-media campaign combining print and online advertising.
For some businesses nothing beats the personal approach of talking directly with your audience. In the ever-advancing digital age remember how important it is to spend time and talk directly with people. Print media such as business cards and brochures can have great lead generation results when combined with a friendly chat and a handshake.
