Having a lot of fans may not increase sales immediately, but it should at least increase the strength of your brand through reputation management, improved customer support, and the conversion of fans into advocates. Over time those tactics can grow sales. Your initial goal, however, should be to expand your reach, provide relevant information about your business, influence potential customers, demonstrate that you have authority in your field, and engage fans.
1 Attract People
Invite Contacts and Friends to Become Fans
Get started by attracting fans. Facebook pages have a feature that allows you to invite contacts to become fans of your new business page. Go to Edit Page, click Resources on the left, and then select Tell Your Fans.
Some contacts will become fans of your page, while others will ignore the request. It’s best to send the request only once; otherwise, you risk annoying potential fans. You can, however, offer an incentive or a reward for becoming a fan, which suits your product/s.
Other methods of giving people the opportunity to find out about your Facebook page include embedding a link in your email signature; adding information about it on your business cards, website, and marketing materials; and posting a sign in your office.
Add a Facebook ‘Like’ Box
It is always recommended to add a Facebook “Like” box to your website. You can do so by going to Edit Page, Resources, Use Social Plugins and selecting Like Box. Fill in the fields and then click the Get Code button. After you copy the code and paste it into your company website, visitors can “Like” your Facebook page directly. Facebook’s ‘Social Plugins’ section under ‘Resources’ has a number of useful tools for websites, too.
Target a Specific Niche
After you start to grow your Facebook fanbase, you can target a specific demographic. This may be the group most likely to become your fans or you might want to focus on growing your customer base in other ways.
For example, you can share their links on your site as they reciprocate by promoting your Facebook posts. If you cultivate strong relationships or have businesses that you recommend–such as a graphic designer who associates with your Web development firm, then you can add that party’s Facebook page to the “favorites” list on your own page. You can easily put any other Facebook page on your list by scrolling to the bottom left and finding Add to My Page’s Favorites.
2. How to Update Your Page
Obtain a Unique Username
Now that you’ve started adding some fans, focus on making your Facebook page interesting to your visitors. First, grab a unique username for your Facebook page to replace the long string of numbers that make up your page ID. (Luckily, Facebook no longer requires that you have 25 fans before you can create a unique username.)
Start on this page to select a username. Note that once you set this name, you can change it only once, and you can’t transfer it to another page so, before you start, confirm that you’re logged in and using your Facebook page under your business name rather than your personal name. Taking this step will prevent your accidentally assigning your business page name to your personal Facebook page. Also, check Facebook’s guidelines for what kinds of usernames you can use; your first choice may already be taken.
Explore Ways to Update
Facebook allows five types of updates:
- Information about your business: You can post information about specials, sales, recent news, and other items of interest. If you have a blog, you can also add links to your blog posts.
- Links to other sites: Other websites may have news and articles that interest your customers. It is advisable to post links to other sites that have new content pertinent to my business.
- Questions: Your fans want to belong to a community. Asking them questions about your products and services, as well as items that they would like to see, helps to engage your fans, which will in turn increase their loyalty to your brand.
- Personal updates: By “personal,” we don’t mean that you should tell customers about your family or home life. Rather, add a distinctive touch that makes people see that a real person is behind the business. This step can be as simple as putting up a Friday post to ask what their plans are for the weekend.
- Responses to questions: Fans will post questions about your products and services, and they may even leave complaints. This is an opportunity to provide excellent customer service. It is better to not ever ignore customer inquiries.
3. Google+: Currently you can integrate a personal profile on Facebook so that your wall posts show up in Google+, but you cannot perform this procedure from a Facebook page. If you want to integrate the two, you will need to add a Google+ tab to your Facebook page. Go to the Facebook application and then to Google Plus Tab for Pages, and add the application to your page.
4. LinkedIn: You can’t post directly from Facebook to LinkedIn, but you can send your Twitter material to LinkedIn. That way, if you’ve set up Facebook to post to Twitter, your Facebook content will also appear on LinkedIn. In your LinkedIn profile, click Add an Application and then select Tweets.
5. Twitter: To integrate Facebook with Twitter, go to this Facebook page. You’ll have control over the type of Facebook posts that are shared with Twitter.
6. Blog posts: You can integrate your blog posts with Facebook via RSS feed by using a Facebook application such as Networked Blogs. Within Networked Blogs, log in with your Facebook account, register your blog, and complete the sign-up process. You can set up blog posts to appear on your Facebook wall automatically; alternatively, you can choose to set up the feed and then post selected articles manually.
These are few practices that can definitely get some traffic on your business page and get your business known. It is also important to make posts consistently because vanishing after making so much hustle, everything will go down the drain.
Being consistent and striving to reach the most people in your potential is the constant energy behind promoting your website or business page.
