TOP TEN WAYS FOR A BUSINESS TO SUCCEED OR FAIL ON FACEBOOK

by Michal Weinstein

Over the past few years SOCIAL MEDIA (par­tic­u­larly Face­book) has become a big part of the ser­vices my com­pany MLWDESIGN offers. It was a nat­ural pro­gres­sion con­sid­er­ing how it works hand in hand with web design and requires at times cus­tomized graph­ics. So it’s safe to say, between per­son­ally being a face­booker and admin­is­trat­ing dozens of pages, I have become quite expert in all things FACEBOOK.

This morn­ing, approx­i­mately 5am, I woke up and started my day as I usu­ally do…checking up on all my PAGES. I like to see if they went up in fans overnight and if any­thing new is going on. Because I am able to see behind the scenes of many pages, what works and what doesn’t is very obvi­ous to me. So based on my expe­ri­ence, I’d like to present the top ten tips for a busi­ness to suc­ceed on Facebook. 

Now I think it’s safe to assume that as a busi­ness owner, your num­ber one goal when delv­ing into the world of social media is to increase aware­ness of your brand, ulti­mately lead­ing to an increase of your bot­tom line. In order to suc­cess­fully accom­plish that goal it’s imper­a­tive you under­stand Face­book and it’s nature before jump­ing in. Your social media strat­egy should keep the fol­low­ing ten tips in mind in order to suc­ceed, oth­er­wise you will lan­guish with few fans and waste a lot of time and money.

1)    DO NOT BE AN ANNOYING TELEMARKETER!

SELL! SELL! SELL! NOT! Let me ask you a ques­tion. Imag­ine your phone ring­ing 4–7 times a night and each time you answer it an annoy­ing pre-recorded voice booms mes­sages loudly such as this: “Quick!!!! Our cars are on sale today only!!!! Come to our show­room and get a great deal while you can!”  or  “Just got in a great dress, per­fect for the beach! Must see!!!“
Even­tu­ally you screen your calls care­fully or even stop answer­ing your phone.  Now imag­ine the calls were dif­fer­ent. It was from an actual human being. Maybe some­one you know from the neigh­bor­hood estab­lish­ment you fre­quent.
Could be Raphael the hair­styl­ist from your salon or War­ren the Shi­han from your local dojo.

“Hey. How’s it going? Can you believe this heat? How you han­dling it? How are the kids now that schools out? Oh, you feel over­whelmed? I hear you. Well feel free to drop them off at the Dojo any­time. We are hav­ing a camp thing going on this week.”

” Hey just check­ing up on you. How’s that smooth­ing treat­ment we did hold­ing up? Great! So glad. After the sum­mer you will need to do it again but for now enjoy your friz free hair. ”

This my friend is the dif­fer­ence between a suc­cess­ful sell and a mas­sive fail.

Face­book works the same way. Peo­ple are not on Face­book to buy buy buy. They are there for the social expe­ri­ence. To con­nect. To keep up. To bust bore­dom. To see how oth­ers live. To learn more. To laugh. In a nut­shell to be enter­tained! So do you under­stand now the approach you need to take to be suc­cess­ful? Do not be that annoy­ing tele­mar­keter.   Give your clients what they are seek­ing and as a result they will become more loyal and your bot­tom line will increase.

2)    BE A FRIEND!
Let’s talk about a few of my most suc­cess­ful FB clients and friends. Bits of glitz, an online cos­tume jew­elry store that sells great, glitzy, fun, glam­orous, cos­tume jew­elry. Owner Chaya is a mom work­ing from home and she has man­aged to amass almost 7,000 fans. That’s right you heard me…7,000! She did not do this overnight. She worked hard for her fans. As a fan of her page you feel like you really know her. She is her brand and her fre­quent posts reflect that.  She doesn’t just sell sell sell. She posts say­ings, inspir­ing images, funny quips. Her per­son­al­ity oozes through her choice of words. And when she does sell you are already hooked on her and it feels like its com­ing from a friend.  A friend you want to hang with.  Hate to break the news to you but FACEBOOK is a pop­u­lar­ity con­test with the most inter­est­ing, cool, hip, fun, funny, pretty get­ting the fol­low­ers. Don’t be a wall­flower. Don’t post nerdy things. Don’t pick your nose while post­ing either…..just be friendly and try and make friends.

3)    STIMULATE YOUR NEW FRIENDS!
Yes give­aways help you get more fans. The big­ger the bet­ter.  How­ever rather than ask your Fan to just like and share to win… Yawn! Why not do inter­ac­tive give­aways that allow your fans to uti­lize their cre­ativ­ity and brain power. Peo­ple like that. They feel like they are work­ing for their prize and it s much more sat­is­fy­ing than just shar­ing and hop­ing you get lucky. It’s like the dif­fer­ence between win­ning a scratch off lotto ticket vs. win­ning an acad­emy for your work and hav­ing the world acknowl­edge your bril­liance. A great exam­ple was a cam­paign I helped run for JEN K DESIGNS where fans had to guess the num­ber of stones in a jar. Or 100% kids cur­rent cam­paign ask­ing peo­ple to come up with a new name for their com­pany. The inter­ac­tive responses are amaz­ing and the num­bers of fans going up don’t lie.  So be cre­ative and don’t jut take easy way out by ask­ing your fans to share.

4)    STEAL
The Inter­net is ripe with great images and quotes and funny thoughts. Become more aware of things your fans would appre­ci­ate and share it. Remem­ber this is all part of being enter­tain­ing.  You don’t have to be com­puter savvy. You just have to know how to save images, cut links and paste. Very Basic skills.  If you don’t know how…time to ask your kids to teach you.

5)    BLOG
Take advan­tage of blog­ging. Ideal sce­nario is for your com­pany to have a blog for the sole pur­pose of search engine opti­miza­tion. Google loves blogs because they are rich with great key words. The more you update your web­site with these rich key words the higher your rank­ing on google. Blogs are great too because they give you a plat­form for sell­ing but in an infor­ma­tive enter­tain­ing way. Sim­i­lar to Face­book but the only dif­fer­ence is peo­ple have to come to your blog whereas your fb posts go to your fans. So shar­ing your lat­est blog arti­cles on Face­book or if you don’t have time or skills to write your own, shar­ing some­one else’s blog arti­cle (giv­ing them credit), is a great way to enter­tain and pro­vide a ser­vice. Note: Make sure those arti­cles are geared towards your audi­ence. A fash­ion site does not want to hear about nuclear sci­ence advances.

6)    DON’T FORGET YOUR ROOTS!
Fashion-isha, AKA. Sharon Langert, a dynamic mom from Lake­wood is an exam­ple of a blog­ger who uses Face­book mag­nif­i­cently. She too has a healthy num­ber of fans in the thou­sands. It is obvi­ous she started blog­ging about fash­ion and lifestyle for the refined woman because of her pas­sion to share her knowl­edge and tal­ents. Along the way busi­nesses noticed that when she writes peo­ple lis­ten and so her blog­ging has opened up many great busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties for her. But it is clear she has not for­got­ten what brought her here in the first place. Her blogs con­tinue to be enter­tain­ing, mean­ing­ful, edu­ca­tional, pep­pered with her pro­mot­ing things that tar­get her mar­ket. As a fan I always am inter­ested in the lat­est shoe com­pany she dis­cov­ered or event she’s involved in because she’s offer­ing me way more than just try­ing to get me to buy. It’s no dif­fer­ent than a mag­a­zine that sells ads but pro­vides juicy con­tent. That’s my friends is what Face­book is all about.

7)    BE IN IT TO WIN IT!
If you are not in it than don’t expect to suc­ceed. How on earth do you expect to under­stand Face­book and what works if you are not on it your­self? And if you are against being on it than do your­self a favor and hire some­one else to run your page or get a rel­a­tive or employee who is on it to do so. But I will warn you: noth­ing replaces the real owner. Peo­ple are not stu­pid and can feel the difer­ence between a hired com­pany that tries to post per­son­able stuff vs. the real deal.  So if you are the busi­ness owner I strongly sug­gest being more hands on.

8)     DUH! TELL PEOPLE YOU ARE ON FB.
This one is obvi­ous but you’d be sur­prised. Add your FB page to your busi­ness cards, web­site and of course pro­mote it in your place of busi­ness. Let peo­ple know you are on FB. I recently came across a great site that sells clothes that I love. Nat­u­rally I fanned them because I know if I don’t I’ll for­get about them. Your cus­tomers will want to be your fans, but some­times you have to remind them or nudge them. Also if you are on FB push your friends to FAN your page. Even if it means invit­ing them fre­quently. If they’re your per­sonal FB friends they should want to sup­port your page…otherwise you might as well DEFRIEND!

9)    YOU SCRATCH MY BACK AND  I’LL SCRATCH YOURS.
Give fre­quent shout outs to oth­ers on FB who please you be it the place you just did your child’s party at (SHOUT OUT TO BREEZY’s WHO DID A FAB JOB ON MY DAUGHTER’S BIRTHDAY PARTY!)  or the beau­ti­cian who gave you a great facial (SHOUT OUT TO LEAH’S BEAUTY CONCEPTS!) . By sin­cerely com­pli­ment­ing oth­ers you are spread­ing good­will and in return you may just get a shout out too. And that’s the best form of adver­tis­ing. Unso­licited shout outs!

10) FINALLY…TAKE A CHILL PILL!
Stop com­plain­ing that it’s hard and that you don’t have enough fans. Under­stand that noth­ing is with­out effort. Sure you can buy fans… There are ser­vices for that. For $25 you can get 1000 fake fans to boost your num­bers and make you look more impor­tant. But let’s be real…nothing com­pares to build­ing qual­ity fans one by one and devel­op­ing a con­nec­tion with them that will both give you per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion and ulti­mately lead to an increase in your bot­tom line.

And isn’t that what it all comes down to in the end?

Michal Wein­stein is owner of mlwde­sign, a full-fledged web design and graph­ics firm that spe­cial­izes in social media.  If you’d like to reprint this arti­cle you can do so by giv­ing credit to michal wein­stein of mlwdesign.com.

How Businesses are Using Social Media

Posted by: Biserka Anderso

Social media has become the de factomar­ket­ing tool for com­pa­nies of all stripes and now we have stats to back this up – 94% of busi­nesses now blog, tweet, pin and post, accord­ing to MBA Pro­grams who have visu­alised the data in this nifty infographic.

But while blog­ging is busi­nesses’ fourth most favourite social media tool (unsur­pris­ingly, after Face­book, Twit­ter and LinkedIn), it looks like it is in decline in the busi­ness world, with the share of com­pa­nies with blogs drop­ping from 50% in 2010 to 37% in 2011.

This is a wor­ry­ing trend, not least because it brings to the fore all the oppor­tu­ni­ties non-blogging busi­nesses are miss­ing out on – rais­ing brand aware­ness, increas­ing online vis­i­bil­ity, estab­lish­ing their rep­u­ta­tion as thought lead­ers, to name a few. It also goes to show that while they have grasped the need for social media in gen­eral, some busi­nesses still don’t under­stand the mas­sive value a reg­u­larly updated com­pany blog can bring to a busi­ness or brand.

Check out the data con­tained in the info­graphic and tell us what tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits you’ve seen from cor­po­rate blog­ging. We par­tic­u­larly rec­om­mend the six mini-tips at the bot­tom of the info­graphic  –  worth print­ing, cut­ting out and pin­ning on your office wall for reference.

Kids Fashion Website

My orig­i­nal design for this site I did sev­eral years back looked like the first image below. Since then it has gone through some changes in order to acco­mo­date new fea­tures that were not around years back. But the look has remained true to my orig­i­nal design.  I par­tic­u­larly love how the logo came out. 

My Facebook Diet

Let me start by say­ing that when I put my mind to some­thing, anything…I go all out. It’s just how I’m wired and who I am. So August 19, 2007 when this new web­site fell into my radar called face­book, I joined.

In those days few of my friends were on and I was still try­ing to fig­ure out what the idea was all about. Was it another MySpace? I never really got into MySpace. Was it a “social” LinkedIn?

A month into my new Face­book mem­ber­ship I deac­ti­vated for a bit since I still didn’t get the point of Face­book, but that quickly changed when more and more peo­ple caught on. At some point I started feel­ing “left out” so I reactivated.

Fast for­ward 5 years, 873 friends and dozens of Face­book pages later I some­how became known as the “Queen” of face­book or in more unflat­ter­ing terms “addicted” to facebook.

My first 2 years on face­book I was learn­ing the ropes. I’d post here and there, share some fam­ily pictures.…facebook was more per­sonal with only 100 or so friends. Even­tu­ally I’d come across an old high school name or some­one from col­lege. It would be fun to see what they were up to. It was in 2008 when I did “Cou­ture for a Cause Kids” when I got my first taste of the power of Face­book for pro­mo­tion. It felt great uti­liz­ing this new tool to do good. The moment in time when the power of FB came to a mas­sive head for me was in 2010 dur­ing the Ilan Tocker story. There is no doubt that with­out FB’s abil­ity to gen­er­ate the buzz, the prayers, the chal­lah bak­ing, the cook­book sales, the ticket sales for event etc. the story would be dif­fer­ent. Not say­ing it saved him, but it would be a dif­fer­ent story.

Through the years I found I had a nack for post­ing insights, humor and sar­cas­tic obser­va­tions and I went with it at full force. It helped that I’d start run­ning into FB friends all over who went out of their way to tell me they enjoy my posts. I always loved writ­ing so I started FB blog­ging here and there and it always amazed me when peo­ple actu­ally read, com­mented and enjoyed. I began to feel like a quasi FB celebrity in my own lit­tle world and I felt pres­sure to keep being witty and interesting.

Through trial and error I started devel­op­ing my own FB rules.
1) I lim­ited per­sonal pic­tures of my fam­ily. I believe that started after the Leiby tragedy.
2) I never posted pic­tures of oth­ers unless I knew 100% it was ok with them. I never posted pic­tures of other chil­dren.
3) I only accepted friend­ships with peo­ple I knew or who had so many mutual friends that I had to know. That is why in 5 years I only amassed 870 friends. As Queen of face­book I could’ve col­lected far more but I wanted to know who my friends were.
4) I learned the pri­vacy set­ting very fast and lim­ited quite a few of my 800 friends so they saw noth­ing but my name. I had rea­sons for each one.
5) I viewed FB as a great busi­ness tool and plugged my busi­ness at every oppor­tu­nity but I also knew that if it was all busi­ness I’d get bor­ing pretty fast.

Finally

5) My posts were NEVER allowed to be per­sonal, stu­pid, bor­ing, annoy­ing. I worked hard to be as enter­tain­ing with­out giv­ing away any­thing real…unless it was my polit­i­cal view or opin­ion about some­thing that I thought was ludi­crous. Then it’s fair game.

From a busi­ness per­spec­tive, I added FB and social media to my ser­vices. Not a week went by with­out at least one busi­ness lead from FB. I began help­ing peo­ple with Pages and at my peek I was man­ag­ing over 30 pages. There was no greater feel­ing than help­ing busi­nesses amass great num­bers of fans and watch­ing for­merly FB clue­less own­ers get into it. Almost all my clients attrib­uted an increase in aware­ness and sales thanks to FB.

So my FB story sounds like quite a suc­cess story…I fig­ured out how to uti­lize this great tool to enter­tain, to show­case my writ­ing, to spread good deeds and increase my bot­tom line. I met some incred­i­ble peo­ple (you know who you are) I oth­er­wise would never have met. Those peo­ple inspired and enhanced my world in many ways, and for that I am grate­ful. Other than a few “heck­lers” who enjoyed teas­ing me about being addicted, most of which clearly spent a lot of time stalk­ing and not posting…what could be bad?

Some­times in life you have to come to your own real­iza­tions. We know this from our own child­hoods when our annoy­ing par­ents doled out advice that we never took. We thought we knew bet­ter until one day we matured enough to real­ize that maybe Mom knew what she was talk­ing about. Per­haps it was that arti­cle that put the bug in my head. It con­nected face­book activism with nar­cis­sism. Am I nar­cis­sis­tic? I asked myself. Sure I enjoy accep­tance, atten­tion, acknowledgement…but who doesn’t. And if I do have slight nar­cis­sis­tic tendencies…don’t many who are suc­cess­ful have those qual­i­ties. It both­ered me but not enough to take a step back. I fig­ured if I’m so nar­cis­sis­tic, I was doing a great job using it for good.

The next Aha! moment came when a friend who has almost 2K FB friends decided to deac­ti­vate her account. I was one of the select few in her life who she texted to tell me she was deac­ti­vat­ing so that I don’t think she G-d for­bid defriended me. (A highly insult­ing offense in our new world)

I called her right after and what she said to me was very insight­ful. Though at that moment I wasn’t ready to jump in with her, I respected her choice and wished her luck. In a nut­shell, she said she found that while FB gave her this sense of com­mu­nity and con­nec­tive­ness, it was replac­ing real life con­nec­tions she could have been cul­ti­vat­ing. She found that by post­ing her every which activ­ity and event, her friends would take it for granted that they knew what was up…so they’d call less, ask less and as a result con­nect less. They felt they knew every­thing so why bother, thus she was los­ing out on real life com­mu­ni­ca­tion. She also felt FB was stop­ping her from work­ing out, from going out, from liv­ing real life. Though her real life was full, she had just got­ten engaged, she was always involved in philanthropy…she only imag­ined how much more it could be if she didn’t allow FB to suck her in a few hours a day. She pointed out some­thing else that I found pro­found. Mark Zucker­berg, KING of Face­book got hitched. How many attended his wed­ding? Maybe 100. Now you try and make a sim­cha for only 100 people.…impossible! But Mark, the man who has the most “friends” in the uni­verse was some­how able to mine his list down to 100. My friend pointed out that while he is mak­ing bil­lions off the con­cept of “help­ing you share and con­nect with the peo­ple in your life” at the end of the day only 100 peo­ple between him and his new wife really counted.

I hear you, I said. But I got it under con­trol. I use it for busi­ness and to enter­tain and I go to the gym, I am involved with so much. It’s not an issue for me.

But seeds were planted and through­out the next few weeks I began to be more aware of how much time I spent look­ing at my news­feed and how much time I spent read­ing var­i­ous arti­cles and posts because of FB. I noticed I would check FB often through­out the day, lost in my iphone while real life includ­ing my kids were all but ignored. Any time I was bored…FB to the res­cue. Dur­ing those dead moments, I never allowed myself to just sit and read a mag­a­zine, call a friend or con­verse with somone on line at the super­mar­ket. While I did home­work with my kids I simul­ta­ne­ously was on FB, laugh­ing at a witty post, respond­ing. My atten­tion was always lost in cyber­space and not in the here and now. I’d start a job and find myself wast­ing 30 min­utes or more on FB. It meant I would then need to work late into the night. I was lit­er­ally los­ing sleep over FB.

I remem­ber how great it felt to have hun­dreds of FB Happy Birth­day wishes from every­one I knew on FB back in March. But then I remem­bered how much bet­ter the texts felt and even more so the phone calls. Noth­ing can replace live inter­ac­tion. One needs to make eye con­tact, hear the vocal tones, see the body lan­guage. FB and even texts don’t cut it.

In the month that my friend got off of FB I think I spoke and saw her more than I did all year. I  too was guilty of tak­ing it for granted that I knew every­thing that was going on in her life. I super­fi­cially felt like I saw her daily and spoke to her when she was on FB. But the past month I actu­ally had to call her, even meet up with her in order to catch up and noth­ing can replace that.

And so I woke up one morn­ing and decided that the “Queen” needs a break. Some­times, like when diet­ing, you need to go extreme inorder to get back to the mid­dle. For me to really learn how to uti­lize FB as a great busi­ness tool, pro­mo­tional tool and occa­sional per­sonal tool with­out replac­ing or affect­ing my real live life, I need to lay off the FB.

I look for­ward to com­ing up with other ways to fill those “bore­dom” moments, even if it means observ­ing my sur­round­ings a bit more. I look for­ward to get­ting lost online work­ing instead of read­ing other peo­ples updates. And I look for­ward to shar­ing my day-to-day foibles and expe­ri­ences with my friends via phone or in per­son and not broad­casted for all to see. Sum­mer is here and it’s a great time to develop new habits. This sum­mer I hope to enjoy the world out­side of my iphone and imac a bit more, know­ing that like choco­late or ice cream, the cyber­world is not going any­where, but like diet­ing BALANCE is everything.

So I’m not cut­ting out FB for life.…God knows me and MLWDESIGN owes FB quite a lot. I’ll be back when I am ready.

For now I’m on a per­sonal NO FB diet. It’s not easy but I know the results will be worth it.

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