Facebook has a neat way for small businesses to interact via Facebook Business Pages. A page won’t cost you anything, and may very well be a terrific way to build a following and interest in your particular company. That’s what we’re counting on, anyway.
We started working on ours a couple of months ago, along with updates to all of our media campaigns, just to see if it really is all it is cracked up to be. Why not, right? Well, simply stated, I can tell why we’re not all jumping out there to do it! Facebook navigation can be time consuming and confusing. Thing is, I believe in the potential. We’re going to figure out exactly how to promote ourselves on Facebook because we strongly believe in what it can do for small and home-based businesses. Meanwhile, here’s a few things we’ve ironed out that we’d like to share with you.
To Publish, or Not To Publish:
It’s nice to work on your page without the scrutiny of public view during the process. We suggest that you remain unpublished until you’ve got some of the technical understanding worked out. To begin with, your logo needs to be on your page, and although it shouldn’t need to be said, so does your COMPANY NAME!! I was perusing the FB search box for companies we should be targeting, and lo and behold–so many companies listed on a group page or category failed to list their company name. Truly, why bother? It takes some time to set up your page, so please take the necessary steps to be able to be found. It’s unwise to publish your page without both company name and contact info easily found and linked back to your Web site.
So What SHOULD Be On Your Business Page?
You’ll have some options about how to ‘feed’ your wall posts. First, you need to decide out loud just what you want to accomplish. Seriously. Do you just want a static presence? Because if that’s all you’re after, a social business page will be pretty meaningless. Remember that the point of having a breathing presence on social sites is to invite curiosity and conversation, divulge helpful tidbits of information, and to get feedback. We’re better when we have feedback from our audience. Many times what your viewers have to say can be helpful both to the way you do business, and for future topics that you will learn already interest them.
Your ‘feed’ can be manually entered posts to your wall, or automatic updates from your blog to your wall. We thought it would be easier to keep our Facebook business page current if we used the blog feeds from our Web site to automatically post for us. Ideally speaking that might be true, but now we don’t believe we could interest anyone like that because doing so left our wall space obnoxious — our company name was repeated too frequently to promote interest, and our blog posts alone looked like a public RSS feed, leaving little to inspire interaction. Once we decided to break it up by manually entering our status updates instead, the page came to life. Now our viewers can see other things that interest them, as well as questions that inspire feedback and conversation.
As we keep breathing life into our FB presence, we’ll be updating our photos with pics from our photographer, Gerald Voigt and uploads from our graphics designer, Scott Alberts. Keep in mind that your photo section should be business related. No boob shots.
How Does Your Page Grow?
Make a habit of searching and inviting followers to your business page. Encourage them to be fans. We decided to devote 10 minutes every day to inviting small business and home based business owners to visit our site and become fans.
Make sure your Facebook badge appears on your company Web site or blog. This is one part I really dig. You’ll have the option to include within your badge (depending on how much space you can support), both your ‘feed’ and followers. They will appear on your actual Web site. That means that when they comment or fan your Facebook Business Page and leave their link, their link will show up on your company Web site viewable through the badge. That turns into an outbound link for you with the potential of a new relationship, and an inbound link for them because the link comes in from your site. Its a win-win!
Good luck with your Facebook Business Page (we hope you’ll ‘fan’ Zero To Sixty Marketing), can’t wait to see you there! What have you learned about your Facebook Business Page promotion?
Great information here. I was glad to recently learn (from Shari) how to favorite other businesses. But, do I (as at the admin) need to to be a fan of that business before I can “favorite” it? I like FB for business but wish it were a bit more user friendly.
Thanks for the helpful info!!
Hi Abby, I didn’t know the answer to your question, so I did a quick search for a restaurant I’m not a fan of to learn the answer. You have to click on the wall tab, but once you’ve done that, you’ll see the option to add it to your page’s favorites … and you don’t have to fan it personally first. I’m with you on wishing it was more user friendly. Hopefully that will improve with the new design they’ve been working on. Thanks – great question!