With all the hype about social media, is it just a fad or are there real business reasons to have a Facebook Page? The answer is undoubtedly yes.
Why is that? Put simply, social networking is fast becoming the thing that consumes more time than any other online activity, and in some cases all spare time. It is a massive marketing opportunity to the smart players. With over 400 Million users and rising daily, and on average a user spends an hour per day on Facebook, can you afford not to be on there?
So do you have a business page and a personal page – absolutely.
Facebook must be incorporated into any online marketing strategy. Your online presence must integrate into not only Facebook, but Twitter, You Tube, Linked-in. For example, nearly 100,000 use Facebook Connect (a powerful set of API’s allowing developers to interface much more closely with Facebook) which is proven to deliver significantly more leads and traffic to those businesses.
One of the key elements is the Fan page. This allows your customer to become a fan of your product or service, showing their contacts that they approve of you – this is like a personal reference for you. This is very powerful as on average each Facebook user has approximately 130 friends, who could become your next client.
Another major development of Facebook is their news feed capability. This gives the ability to feed relevant content to fans, friends and users based on posts you have made in the past on topics Facebook thinks they will like. This makes it very important that the posts and comments made are relevant and what works best for your brand. Facebook Analytics provide data on your content engagement scores for you to monitor and adjust messages.
Real-time searches are changing in the marketplace. With the likes of Twitter and WordPress making its streams public, Facebook has also moved to do this (unless you mark the content private). Bing and Google are now incorporating this data into search results as well as normal web content searches. This has a major effect on search engine optimisation and brand management – both positive and negative. If you get good reviews on Facebook, then your reputation will increase, however bad or negative comments about your organisation or brand can also be reflected at the top of search engines too, having a detrimental effect to your business.
So now you have a Facebook Page or one that is not performing – how do you make it better and promote it?
Unfortunately, most companies start off with a bang, but get disillusioned as it does not seem to be performing, then drop it for more important things. Having a Facebook Page is much more than just having one – you need to make sure it is constantly updated with relevant content but not just a few wall posts; it has to be video, images, links and of course loads of great articles and content.
Here is a few tips on promoting your Facebook Page:
- Get a link on your website and make it prominent
- Get a Fan Page set up
- Add other Social networking profiles to your Fan page
- Create a Google profile for you business and add links to your Fan page
- Add the link to your email footers – make sure the link works too!
- Add to your business cards
All this takes time to learn and making mistakes is not an option, so why not contact your Curve account manager and discuss how we can ease the pain, set it all up for you, train you and advise on any new developments as they arise.