Social Media for Entrepreneurs Workout 2: Get Facebook Fit

Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Natalie in Entrepreneurs, Highlights, Marketing & Sales, Social Media

Facebook is huge, with over 400 million users now it’s the place to be, both personally and for your business. Love it or hate it, you need to get yourself in Facebook shape quick.

You likely already have a personal profile on Facebook. In this session I’ll take you how to set up a Facebook Page for your business or brand and how to work it.

There are now more than 3 million active Pages on Facebook and half of these are local businesses.

According to Facebook the average user becomes a fan of 4 pages every month. That means exposure for you, your cause, your organization and your business.

Free for all

That double entendre was implied. I can’t get over the fact that people shy away from Facebook and think it’s a waste of time. For a start it’s FREE. With realtime feeds it’s also one of the largest search engines and a fantastic place to monitor the latest trends from real people – your potential customers.

A Facebook page acts as a free mini website so on the off chance you don’t have your own, then use Facebook. You can share information, links, photos, videos, poll your fans, run competitions, start discussions, feed your blog and twitter posts to it and more. No technical knowledge required.

Let’s start the Facebook workout.

Exercise 1. Create a Facebook Page

The easiest way is to just go to www.facebook.com/pages to set one up.

When you’re choosing the type of Page it’s important that you pick the right name as you won’t be able to change this later. Then it’s all up to you – have fun, get creative and make sure you target your message to the right audience.

Top Tip: Once you have 100 fans you can acquire your own `vanity’ URL with your business name so it’s much easier to search for you, e.g facebook.com/womanzworld

Exercise 2. Make Your Facebook Page Unique

The most effective Facebook Pages create unique fresh content on a regular basis. It’s not about replicating what’s on your website, or putting out the same messages that you may already promote via email and twitter. I learned that over time!

Courtesy of Wildfire App

It’s about getting personal and creating content that will build a community, showcase your own personality, or that of your business and engage with your fans. Check out Entrepreneurs Inc page and click on Vitamin Water’s page shown here.

Depending on what your organization does, this could mean anything from sharing fun facts about you, your business or a relevant topic, posting details of an upcoming event your holding or attending through to publishing pictures of recent work, a new product release or a customer you’ve worked with.

Exercise 3. Be Active

Use your Facebook page to give people an insight to the real you and what your business does. Publish insightful and interesting information in your status updates, ask your fans what they think with polls or when you post videos, photos or other links.

Ask your fans to utilize the Share options when you publish to your Wall, so that friends in their networks can also find out about your organization.

Exercise 4. Start talking

In order to build a community on Facebook you need to start and continue a conversation. You’re the voice of your business or organisation, so speak up. You don’t need to respond to every comment or question but you need to remain engaged.
Sometimes your fans will work on your behalf and answer for you and keep the conversation going, this all drives activity to your page.

Advanced Workout – go on push yourself!

Exercise 1. Be Insightful

If you go to > Edit Page you’ll a handy feature called `Insights Dashboard’. Here you can also analyze how fans are interacting with your page which gives you instant feedback on what your fans are doing.

As with any analysis tool it important to monitor your Facebook Page to see what’s working and what’s not. Do your video posts get more comments than your blog posts? Are you getting any comments at all? Keep up to date with what’s happening and work it to your advantage.

Exercise 2. Create multiple points of contact

Make sure your page has calls to action that allows fans to interact with you on other forms of media. Ask them to sign up to your newsletter, get them to connect with your on Twitter, visit your website, your YouTube channel and visit your blog.

If you have a blog you can actually sync it directly with your page. You just need to install the `Notes’ application and add it as a tab on your page and it will automatically feed in.

Even better is verifying your blog with Networked Blogs, then you can install this app on a tab and it feeds your blog in a much more visually appealing format.

The same applies to Twitter. You can also install the Videos app or even the YouTube one to directly link your accounts.

Exercise 3. Buy a Facebook Ad

If done right, those ads you see on the right-hand side of Facebook are an effective way to increase your fan base or visits to your page OR website. Given Facebook made $225M via them in 09 then it’s clear people are finding advertising effective. To set one up go to  facebook.com/ads

I recently started using them for FundRazr and was impressed at how effective they were at driving potential users of our app. They are super simple to set up and activate, you just need a succinct and compelling message as the word limit is small and an image, which is optional.

You can also do some amazing targeting of your audience and get very niche or go extremely broad. For example females in Paris aged 34-44 who are interested in tennis and wine. There’s a lot of flexibility.

The cost per click through rates are pretty high but you can set your budget to reflect what you can work with, and you can pause, edit and delete them at any time – we all knows as entrepreneurs like to think we’re in control ……

Exercise 4:

Use the Wildfire Application to run customised sweepstakes and campaigns on your page for a reasonable price. Use the FundRazr app to collect payments, sell tickets or run a fundraising campaign. For an example of an innovative campaign check out my birthday competition!

Stay tuned for Friday when we discuss Toning Up With Twitter. Feel free to post any questions or comments below too.

• The Entrepreneurs Social Media Workout 1: Back to Basics
• Five steps to taking your networking online (and into the social media age)
• 8 Steps To Becoming a Savvy Social Media Entrepreneur

Tags: Building a Fan base, Facebook Fan Page Tips, Facebook for Business, Networked Blogs app, Social Media Workout for Entrepreneurs, Wildfire App