Facebook Giveaway
0
5 Proven Techniques for Building up Your Facebook Page
As a small business owner you are probably pulled in a thousand different directions running your business and are wondering why you should devote precious moments of your time to social marketing on Facebook. Here are a few key items to consider when deciding how to prioritize your time:
- Lots of potential for new business – There are over 900 million (and counting) users on Facebook today.
- Your existing and potential customers are already on Facebook - With such a high number of users, your current customers are already on Facebook and you can start marketing to them to strengthen your relationship with them.
- Match/Exceed your competitors – Your competitors are on Facebook too. If you are not using Facebook to promote your business, you might actually be losing business to your competition.
- Numbers don’t lie- According to Facebook’s February 2012 data:
- 51% of consumers are more likely to buy a product or brand after liking them on Facebook.
- 80% of consumers are more likely to try new things based on friends’ suggestions made in social media
- 74% of consumers are more likely to encourage friends to try new products.
- Social Media is becoming more influential at each phase of the connected world.
- It’s not that hard! – Not to toot our own horn, but tools like Pagemodo are constantly evolving to make social marketing on Facebook a snap, even if you don’t have any technical skills.
If you are just getting started utilizing Facebook to promote your small business here is a quick checklist to help you create a strong social presence and build up your Facebook fan base.
5 Proven Techniques for Building up Your Facebook Page
- Select a vanity URL –A vanity URL describes a custom website address you can create for your Facebook fan page. It usually looks like www.facebook.com/yourbusinessname instead of a default URL assigned by Facebook. Please note you will need to have at least 25 fans in order to be eligible to create a vanity URL.
- Set your cover photo & profile photo – Once your business has a new fan page and a custom URL, it’s time to start thinking about your branding. One way to convey your brand and what it stands for is by taking full advantage of available cues: cover photo and profile photo. Think about posting imagery that helps to tell the story about your business.
- Add milestones & key moments – Potential customers want to conduct business with companies that they trust, one way to create trust on your fan page is by adding and highlighting important dates and events for your small business. If you can, try to make these milestones as visual as possible to help them pop when visitors are scanning your page. Learn how to add milestones.
- Get your customers to Like your page – Timeline does not allow page owners to default the landing page on which visitors land, but that doesn’t mean you can’t encourage growth of your fan base. One way to grow the number of your fans is by providing valuable information that existing and potential customers want (for example a coupon code) that can be accessed once a user becomes a fan of your page. You can achieve this by adding a “Like Gate” that hides your content: It is important to note that growing the number of followers on your page should not be a only a numbers game.Quality matters more than quantity – target potential customers so that you can engage them. Don’t stop here – email your contacts, and tell them about your Facebook Page. Make sure you add a link to your Like-gated page.
- Engage fans with quality content – Now that you have created and customized your page it’s time to make sure you are posting quality information that your fans can interact with. Here are a few pointers to think about when creating content for your fan page:
- Posting visual and timely updates increases fan engagement and also increases the virality of your Facebook Page, potentially attracting new fans
- Post on regular basis – try to post at least 2-3 times a week
- Interact with your fans by responding to posted comments and questions
- Don’t be afraid to be yourself and showcase your personality
- It is okay to ask questions (remember we can all learn from our customers!)
5 Ways Social Media Can Increase Your Revenue From Existing Customers
By Nichole Kelly
Published May 10, 2012
Are you using social media to keep your existing customers happy?
Do you want to figure out how to drive revenue from existing customers through the social channel?
This post will give you 5 tips to gain more revenue from your existing customers using social media.
Why Focus on Existing Customers?
For many companies, connecting with their existing customers is a natural fit for social media. These companies are seeing conversations about their brands, their competitors and their industry that provide them with an opportunity to engage others in dialogue.
The value of the customer base for companies is substantial. We’ve all heard that it costs more to get a new customer than to keep your existing ones. So it makes sense that we would see more companies developing strategies to engage customers with the social channel.
Social media represents a low-cost way for companies to engage customers in two-way dialogue and develop deeper relationships. Relationships are a benefit that is difficult to achieve with other marketing channels. One often-overlooked opportunity is to use social media to strategically drive incremental revenue from existing customers.
Tip #1: Give Customers Incentives for Making More Frequent Purchases
Whether you are in a service- or product-based industry, you have the ability to increase revenue by encouraging customers to make purchases more frequently.
For service industries, this may mean promoting add-on services, upgrades or premium offerings. For product industries, this includes encouraging customers to come back more often. How can you do this with social media?
You can offer deals and specials that are exclusive to your social media followers based on the level of customer or the frequency of purchase.
For example, if you are a software company, you could offer exclusive discounts to your user conference for social media followers based upon the number of software licenses they are using. Or if you are a product company, you could do a coupon for social media followers that provides a 50% discount off their fifth purchase.
Wine of the Month Club offers fan-only specials.
Tip #2: Give Customers a Reason to Spend More at Each Purchase
The second way you can drive revenue from existing customers is to get them to spend more at each purchase. So if your average transaction is $35, the goal would be to get the customer to spend $50. This can also be accomplished by exclusive deals for social media fans and followers.
You’ve probably seen coupon campaigns many times that are designed to achieve this. Coupons such as $25 off a $100 purchase are aimed at increasing the amount spent at each purchase. Why do they work? In consumers’ effort to get to a $100 purchase, they tend to spend more. This works well for product-based companies, but what about service industries?
Service industries can look to promote package deals for their services that bundle offerings together. In this case, the social channel is used to drive awareness of the offerings with a clear call to action, versus promoting deals or coupons like we typically see for product-based industries.
31 Bags gives Facebook discounts for spending more money.
Tip #3: Combine Email Marketing Offers
Keep in mind it’s important to maintain a balance of content on your social channels. The general rule is less than 20% of your content should be about your company. Therefore, a mix of your own content with information from relevant third parties is important.
The last thing you want is to have a social channel that is flooded with deals and promotions with very little customer engagement.
It will be important to think through why a customer would be interested in buying what you are offering and what the process is for them to actually make a purchase so that you can optimize the path to conversion from the social channel to the sales funnel.
Tip #4: Educate Your Customers about Your Other Products and Services
Another important element of increasing sales is to make sure customers are aware of the other types of services or products your company offers. You can do this by featuring a product or service profile of the week, which provides you with the opportunity to highlight premium services and explain what they are and why customers should care.
Don’t be boring; combine the types of content you use to educate the customer with blog posts, photos, webinars and videos.
Under Armour cross-promotes product lines on Facebook.Tip #5: Provide Consistent Value
At the end of the day, it’s difficult to keep an audience engaged if you’re constantly running another promotion on your social channels. Therefore, it’s important to find a way to balance your content and provide value to customers.
If your customers find value in the content you produce for your social channels, they are far more likely to keep coming back for more.
InfusionSoft, a small business customer relationship management system, has done an excellent job of providing value to their customer base. They recognize that they have sales and marketing expertise inside their company that the small businesses they serve may not have.
Therefore, instead of promoting a bunch of features their software offers, they position themselves as business advisors to their clients. They provide tips, resources and tons of information that their clients can use to grow. Ultimately, the more their clients grow, the more InfusionSoft grows.
As you consider how to grow your customer base through the social channel, it’s important that you create a win-win situation like InfusionSoft has. If you are only there to serve your own needs, customers will recognize your attitude early. Instead, find a way to combine your desire to increase revenues with the thing that motivates your customers the most.
Read before jumping into Social Media!
by Brad Smith
Businesses shouldn’t rush into social media.
Because having no social media presence at all is better than having a bad one.
Just because something is popular or trendy doesn’t mean you need to do it.
It all depends on your unique situation.
Here are 3 questions you need to answer before jumping in to social media.
1. How will it support your business?
Most people start social media because they hear about it on TV, read about it in the news and hear from others that “it’s a great way to market your business”.
But most don’t understand why they’re doing it, or what to expect from it.
They can’t define what success will look like before they begin.
That’s a big problem. You don’t need to know the ROI. But you do need to understand how it’s going to either (1) increase revenue, (2) decrease costs, or (3) increase customer support.
So figure out your social media goals before jumping in head-first. Then when you understand it, you’ll appreciate it more and invest more time and effort.
2. Are your expectations realistic?
Being successful in social media is extremely difficult.
It’s a 24/7 job, constantly evolving, So you need to have realistic expectations.
Not only in terms of success (see #1 above). But also what it’s going to take to succeed.
Because it may be inexpensive, but it takes a ton of effort and time. So if you don’t have the energy, or can’t hire people to take control, then don’t even start.
For example, you can’t hire blog writers for $10 per article and expect it to drive business and build an audience.
And you can’t launch a new website, and expect SEO traffic to flood your website the next day.
Inbound marketing tactics like social media and content marketing can drastically improve your marketing ROI.
But they’re difficult, time consuming, and long-term tactics. You need to be willing to work for the long-term payoff if you want social media to build your business.
3. Why should your target customers care?
Finally, why should your customers read your blog posts, “Like” your Facebook page, or interact with you online?
The key to social media is engagement. Because without it, people won’t stick around any buy something.
And people don’t interact with you because you’re awesome. They do it because it benefits them.
Maybe it makes them laugh, cry, or shocks them into taking action.
Either way, it’s not about you. To succeed in social media, you need to be laser-focused on your audience and their needs, wants and desires.
For example, just because you’re in a “boring industry” doesn’t mean people won’t read your blog posts or follow you on Twitter. You just need to focus on what your product or services does for them, and come up with blog content ideas around that.
Because if you want people to interact, then you need to get them to care. This isn’t easy. You need to engage them, watch what they respond to, and be ready to experiment.
And if you’re not ready to embrace that, then you’re probably better off not wasting your time at all.
