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One of our most popular Q&A Calls was about Facebook, and unsurprisingly most of the questions asked were on using Facebook for Business. And yet so many small businesses claim that Facebook doesn’t work for them. Here are 5 reasons why that could be true.
They’re using a Personal Profile instead of a Page
This used to happen more than it does now. The standard introduction to Facebook is signing up for a personal profile. Before you know it, you’re connecting with business contacts and prospective clients as ‘friends’. So you figure you might as well get on and promote your business to them anyway. This will never be totally satisfactory as you’ll miss out on all the brilliant features of having a Page – for example anyone can access your Page like a normal web url, even without a Facebook account, whereas if you use your personal profile, only people who are Facebook members will be able to find you.
They set up a Page – and then forget about it
Let’s say you do get around to creating a Page for your business. You upload a logo, put a few words on the info page with a link to your website and then ….. so many people run out of steam at this point and leave their pages unfinished. Because they don’t know what to do next, they do nothing and it starts gathering virtual dust. Unfortunately there are many abandoned Pages on Facebook.
They believe their clients aren’t on Facebook
With over 800 million users (at the end of 2011), it certainly makes sense to leverage the might of this social network to get your message in front of potential customers, whether you’re a B2B or B2C business. Of course there are some target markets who don’t belong to Facebook, but make your decision based on solid research rather than ‘just a feeling’. After all, if 9 in 10 marketers are using Facebook, they’re doing so for a reason!
They don’t tell anyone about their Page
Just as you need to help people find your website, you have to direct people to your Facebook Page and ask them to ‘like’ it. And it’s an ongoing process, so while a big splash when you launch the page will quickly get you plenty of initial likes, numbers will soon stagnate if you stop telling people about your Page. Keep numbers climbing by making it part of your overall marketing campaign to take regular, consistent action to build your community.
They don’t engage with their Facebook community
We’ll admit to not always being very good at this ourselves – but we are trying! It isn’t enough to automatically pull in your blog posts and do nothing else. And don’t be tempted to duplicate your tweets by the way, because your Facebook ‘likers’ often aren’t the same as your Twitter followers so you can’t treat them as if they were. Engaging with your community means chatting with them on the wall, asking questions, sharing other people’s stuff as well as your own. Here’s an excellent article from Denise Wakeman with some more ideas to try out.
What would you add? Please share your tips below.
Hi Savvy Team, good article and well put. I would also add to this that it’s important to have a cause for your page, something that visitors can ‘like’ you for. It could be a charity cause that you support or something fun related to your business like a bathroom company who want to get the world singing in the shower.. Thats their cause and they promote songs and recordings , even carefully taken pics on their site and invite fans to take part. That would give people more of a reason to like their page and make .
Hope this helps.
Hi Sue, thanks for commenting here – glad you like the article! You make an excellent point about the need for small businesses to have a cause for their Facebook Page. So many start one up without any plan or purpose and then don’t know how to make the most of it as a marketing tool. I’d certainly want to visit your bathroom company’s page!