You have a business and you heard that Facebook is one of the first things you need to use to market your facebook business. So you create a fan page, add your logo, and announce to your friends, family, and customers that you have your facebook fan page, as you begin planning out the rest of your business strategy.
At the beginning, you have fun interacting with your new fans and you have great conversations happening around your products or services, adding a touch of personality here and there and noticing why so many people have resorted to using facebook for business.
But then, the three most dreaded things happen. A couple of months later…
- You only have 50 fans when you expected to have hundreds by now.
- Your fans are not visiting your page as much.
- You hear crickets chirping, because your fans stopped commenting on your wall posts.
Do you know what just happened? You just experienced what most businesses go through when engaging in social media marketing. It’s all good and fun at first, but then the honeymoon ends and you start to feel the mundaneness and burden of keeping up your fan page. Everyone feels the akwardness, including your fans.
Create discipline around your social marketing media efforts
Facebook marketing is just like any other marketing effort and should be treated respectfully as such. You should have a goal, a structure, and an execution plan. And for savvy business owners, you would want to add another layer of control called metrics.
Every marketing effort should have a way to track its effectiveness and return on investment. Therefore, having a “rinse and repeat” method of testing, tracking, analyzing, and re-positioning is the key to marketing success. Whether you are using facebook, twitter, linkedin, youtube, and especially your website, it is imperative to have some sort of metrics in place.
Without these things, you allow yourself to fall prey to these three biggest failures:
- Failure #1: Failure to understand how to market on Facebook
- Failure #2: Failure to effectively run promotions on Facebook
- Failure #3: Failure to achieve high traffic potential to your fan page
No one likes to fail, and everyone wants to succeed. Without further ado, let’s jump into ways you can avoid failing in social media marketing, specifically when it comes to using Facebook for business, and there are a few business tips.
How to avoid failure #1: Failure to understand how to market with Facebook advertising
Every marketing effort needs a plan. Here are 2 important tips that you can modify and apply to your business.
1. Write often but not too often. This is dependent on your industry and the level of engagement you have with your fans.
2. Write with a purpose. Here are “5 Quick Tips on Fan Page Wall Posting”:
- Keep it interesting.
- Be intriguing.
- Make your wall post comment-able.
- Comment on the comments.
- Sprinkle here and there a shameless plug on your business product or service.
Important Note: Track your shameless plugs. This is where metrics will come into play. It would be good to add a link that goes through some sort of tracking (analytics) service.
How to avoid failure #2: Failure to effectively run promotions on Facebook
This is probably the biggest mistake that businesses make with their fan page. The mistake is two-fold… 1) Eye-appeal and 2) Intrigue.
Create Eye-Appeal & Interest in Your Fan Page
First of all, most businesses tend use their wall to attract new fans. Let me ask you, how eye-catching is the wall? There’s nothing there to set your business apart. It’s mostly a bunch of small text in a stack, with some images or videos sprinkled in.
The way smart businesses present themselves is with their best foot forward. Instead of sending new visitors to their wall, they send them to a landing page that has eye-catching design and an intriguing message. That message usually encourages visitors to click on the “Like” button in order to enter the particular fan page.
Create Engagement While Collecting Intelligence
Why not go one step further and capture valuable data on your fans? Lead generation is the start of a turn a visitor into a prospect. By capturing their information such as their name and email address, you now have their permission to contact them outside of facebook.
In addition to gathering user data, you can also run campaigns such as contests, sweepstakes, polls, surveys, or whatever else you can think of. In this way, there is reciprocity on your part for asking for their information.
If you execute this correctly, your fan engagement can lead to more new fans and eventually leads, sales, and traffic to your website. The returns on this effort can be infinite.
How to avoid failure #3: Failure to achieve high traffic potential to your fan page
This last failure to avoid goes off of the previous point. If you don’t have a way to engage fans while capture their data, then the burden of getting traffic to your fan page is solely yours. However, if you plan things correctly, you will create such enthusiasm for your fan page that your fans will tells their friends about it.
This is what we at VionicApps.com call a “Viral Frenzy”.
The difference between traditional online advertising and social media marketing is the viral factor. It takes creativity on your part, but just like in mastering anything else, you have to work through it, practice a lot, and then you will start to get the hang of things.
If you would like to create an engaging fan page that collects user data for your marketing, then take a look at the two ways we can help you.
Self-serve Engagement & Data Capture Campaigns with iDesign
iDesign is ideal for businesses looking for an affordable solution and have a staff person to create Fan Page Campaigns.
Customized Solution with vDesign
vDesign is perfect for social businesses with larger budgets who are looking a customized, branded design for their fanpage campaign.
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