Many shrewd businessmen and women spotted the untapped potential of Facebook from the off and made sure they hit the ground running.
They recognised that the social media environment is tailor-made for business promotion and that the medium gives a unique opportunity for a business to branch into markets that in large measure were previously unreachable. Others were less quick on the uptake, and have failed to attract the kind of audience that can boost sales. If your business is new to all of this, or perhaps hasn’t fully embraced the digital revolution, there are things you can do to maximise social media benefits and attract the audiences you’d ideally like. Here are a few suggestions to help you get more ‘likes’ on your Facebook business page.
The aim of any business Facebook page is to increase traffic to your website and engage with your customers. Achieving this won’t necessarily be easy, but any effort you put in will be repaid handsomely in the longer term. What you need to do is come up with a strategy that will engage your customers both on and offline. In short you need to get users to ‘like’ or endorse your Facebook page and products.
Facebook business pages: is your’s a place users will want to visit?
You can produce the best content in the world, but if users don’t want to visit your page or feel disengaged from the message you’re sending, good content is meaningless. So you need to get to know your target audience and get to understand them. This will require research, but it needs to be done. Find out what they might want, and offer it to them. Tell them about your latest products, blog about them and ask users what they think. You’re trying to build a community at the end of the day, and any community relies on dialogue. If you’re stuck for ideas, look what other sites are offering.
Make it easy to be liked.
Always remember to add a ‘like’ button to your pages. Ask your Facebook friends to ‘like’ your page and don’t be shy in asking these friends to recommend you to their friends. It might not be the British way, but don’t be afraid of a little self-promotion. Put the link to your Facebook page wherever you can, whether that’s in your blog or on business cards and flyers. You could also try looking for other pages that happily will promote your business. If they’re available it makes sense to use them.
Be creative and keep your users interested in what you have to say.
Why not try running a competition occasionally. This isn’t selling out or pandering to the lowest common denominator: it’s simply common sense, and it’s proved to be very effective tactic for attracting new visitors.
Blog and post messages on other sites.
Although you may already have a blog on your own website with a link to it on your Facebook page, why not try guest-blogging for someone else and adding the link to your Facebook page from this site. Obviously this tactic only works if you’ve got something interesting and unique to say. Forget the idea of a pure sales pitch as this won’t work. Also remember that the site you gest blog on must have some sort of relationship or link to your own. When you do post your own blogs, remember to put links to your Facebook page so that viewers will be aware of these. You can do this automatically if you’d prefer by setting up networked blogs.
