Facebook

 

Facebook is often seen as the holy grail of social media platforms. Because so many people spend so much time on it, it’s definitely an essential space to market your brand.

Facebook is a space that people share with their friends and family, along with the few brands that they choose to “like”. It’s key to remember this – that you’re pushing your message into a personal platform and if you push too hard, then people won’t want to engage with your page.

The recipe for Facebook success is fairly simple – all it is, is sharing relevant and interesting content around your brand and your services, engaging with your fans on a personal level, and keeping self-promotional sales to a minimum.

Here are 10 recommended steps to follow that will help you build up your Facebook fan base:

1. Don’t be pushy

These kinds of posts: “By our great products!” “Book a trip with us!” “Sign up for services with us!” “Become our customer!” are not going to do you any favours on Facebook. Yes, you can sell your products and services, but you need to use soft selling methods – don’t go in for the hard sell. You also need to sandwich sales in between

2. Create a content niche

On Facebook, content is definitely king. It’s the meat around which your whole page is based. By content, I don’t mean press releases about your latest software product. You should be informing your fans about new product releases and additions to your services, but this is not why they’re likely to follow you on Facebook. People will follow you when you share interesting content around your niche. If you sell hiking shoes, share content around hiking, trails and hiking holidays; if you have a catering business, share recipes, food tips and beautiful food photos. Find a range of awesome content to post from blogs, websites and other social media platforms and mix it up with the occasional post from your own website.

3. Run competitions

Competitions are a great way of growing your fan base, getting your fans engaged and introducing new potential customers to your brand. It’s a good idea to give away prizes that are inline with what your brand offers – so if you’re a travel company, give away holidays rather than iPads. If you own a used car company, you don’t have to give away cars – you could give away subscriptions to Car magazine or Top Gear magazine.

4. Use photos

Facebook has become an increasingly visual platform, and research has shown the people respond more to posts with photos than those without. Obviously the key thing is to use relevant photos – if you’re selling cosmetic dentistry don’t use photos of wildlife in Kruger.

5. Be engaging

Don’t let your Facebook page be a one-way feed from you – it should be a conversation between you and your fans. Ask fans open-ended questions to find out their responses, ask them their opinions on content you post, start up debates, and always respond quickly to questions fans ask of you.

6. Be consistent

Decide on how regularly you want to post and stick to that. It’s advisable to post at least once a day (but be careful of posting too many times a day as this gets spammy and annoying) to keep your content fresh and to keep in the minds of your fans. If you decide to post once a day, you need to stick to it – so make sure you have the time to do it. If you know that you won’t have time to post every day, then decide on three times a week or twice a week and make sure you stick to that schedule. The mistake a lot of people make is having a lot of energy and enthusiasm at the beginning, when they launch their page, and then not doing a post for weeks, in which time your fans will have forgotten about your page, and when you do finally do a post again, it’s unlikely to show up in their newsfeeds.

7. Be patient

Building a significant fan base of over 10 000 fans doesn’t happen overnight – it takes time and effort. If you follow these 10 steps, you won’t suddenly have thousands of fans on your page. You need to work at building your base over months and years

8. Promote your page

Put your page in your email signature and on the back of business cards, promote it from your other social media channels, and let your customers know about it.

9. Spend money on Facebook adverts

Facebook advertising is getting better and better, with increasingly granular targeting. Now you can choose to target your ads to 20-year-old men in Pretoria who love knitting and cooking Indian food. Facebook ads do work in increasing your fan base, especially if your hook is a competition – this gives people an incentive to like your page. You can decide how much money you want to spend on adverts – anything from $4 a day and up.

10. Utilise Facebook Insights

Facebook has a free tool, Facebook Insights, to help you track your fan numbers and engagement levels. You’ll be able to view Facebook Insights at the top of your brand page if you are an admin of the page. Check Insights regularly to see how your page is growing daily, and see which posts have done well – it will also give you a good idea of what your optimum posting time is, if you test out posts over different times of day.

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