By Gloria Rand
Have you finally caved in to peer pressure and started a Facebook page for your business? Relax. If your customers are on Facebook, you made the right decision. Facebook is a great way to create brand awareness, engage with your customers and generate new sales for your business as long as you don’t make these mistakes:
Facebook Page Marketing Mistakes
1. Posting infrequently – Some business owners get impatient with Facebook, expecting instant gratification and stop posting after a few weeks. Then, when they start posting again, they wonder why they haven’t acquired new fans. It takes time to build a following. Consistency is the key. Post several times a week. Depending on your industry, you may want to concentrate your efforts at the end of the week, rather than the beginning.
2. Posting too much – Don’t go to the other extreme with your posts. I’ve seen some pages that send out 5 posts right in a row. That’s just too much, and borders on spam. If you’re just starting out, post once or twice a day, at the most. As you build a following, you can post a little more frequently, especially if there’s some great news that you just can’t wait to share until the next day.
3. Selling, instead of telling – There’s nothing worse than a Facebook page that only talks about the great deals they have on their products or services. If you want to sell all the time, take out a Facebook ad! Instead, share helpful tips about your product or service. Post pictures and videos. The aim here is engagement not broadcasting.
4. Not having an end goal in mind – Before you start posting anything on your page, you should figure out what you want the page to do for your business. Do you want to use it to drive traffic to your website? Do you want to use the page for brand awareness? Maybe you want the page to be a vehicle where your customers can share stories about how they use your product. Determining your goal will help you determine what you post.
5. Boring your audience – Don’t just post status update after status update or photo after photo. Mix up the content. Throw in a comment that’s off topic. Be personal once in a while. I recommend the 80/20 rule. 80% of the time, your content should be business-related, 20% of the time, your content can be personal.
6. Failure to take advantage of Facebook tools & apps – Have you created a custom welcome tab for your page? There are some excellent tools available to help you do this. Does your profile picture/logo display correctly in your thumbnail? If not, make sure you edit the picture to fix it.
7. Violating Facebook’s terms of service – There’s no quicker way to get your page banned from Facebook, than to violate their rules. What are the most common violations? Using your personal profile for business, rather than using a proper Facebook page. Failing to follow Facebook’s rules about running contests. And “tagging” people in an image without their permission. “Tagging people to get their attention is not only a violation of Terms but can be reported by those you are tagging as abusive behavior on your part — which brings your violation to Facebook’s attention and opens your Page’s content to review,” warns small business marketing consultant Lisa Jenkins.
The best way to avoid these common mistakes is to take the time to learn the Facebook platform, educate yourself on how to build and sustain an audience, (reading this blog is one good way!) and remembering to engage with people, just like you do in real life.
If you’d like some one-on-one tutoring in the art of Facebook marketing, contact me today.
Great tips, Gloria!
Thank you!!
You’re welcome!
Those are some really great tips… thanks for sharing them. Oh, and that reminds me that I need to finish working on some welcome screens on some of the pages I am monitoring!!!
Great tips, Gloria! I’ve approached FB pretty much as a business venture from the start, but I’m not sure I get the “using your personal profile for business”. That is, I don’t always understand the true differences between different types of pages. Guess I’d better study up! 🙂
Thanks, Wendy! One difference between personal profiles and business pages is that you can only have a limited number of friends on a personal profile. Some people created personal profiles in their business name, but I really don’t see the advantage of doing that. You have a lot more functionality with biz pages – such as creating custom tabs to display different info for your business.
Excellent, concise! Tight work, Gloria! 🙂 These tips are most definitely the cornerstone of facebook business use.
Kim
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