Facebooking Around
Karl Marx described religion is the opium of the people. Many people have described television as a thief of life and time. Facebook can be considered in a comparable way.
Please don’t get me wrong; Facebook has some valuable features that allow for free and easy communication between people. However, it suffers from the inability of the human beings using it to self-edit or limit, the content they put on it. Which means that the average person sees a wide variety of information from their friends, and other sources, that is of questionable quality or use.
But this mediocre material gives opportunity. It is easy for you to be able to stand out from the crowd if you do it right. Like all your marketing material, you need to be posting material on Facebook that is of high quality, is interesting, and will entice the reader to go to your website, or use the telephone number included in the post to call you.
Your aim is to get people to the privacy of your website so you can talk to them without the clutter that goes on on Facebook.,
Be prudent
You need to have a mixture of posts on Facebook that show the humanity of your business, products and services you sell, and other materials you feel your target market may find interesting even if it isn’t your own material.Just to expand on that last statement, you need to bear in mind all the laws and implications of copyright when you are deciding to post other people’s material on your Facebook feeds. You also need to research the accuracy of third-party posts you may be choosing to use. Please, please read and understand any source information to make sure that it aligns with your marketing effort. Too many times I have seen companies post inappropriate material which indicates that they have read the headline only and not understood the nature of the material
Boosting posts
Facebook is there to make money; it does so in numerous ways including giving businesses the ability to boost posts. This means that you are able to pay to have your posts shown on the feed of people who are not your friends on Facebook, or like your business faceboook page.This allows to introduce yourself to people you don’t know but may be interested in doing business with you. You can select your proof supposed is seen by selecting from various geographical and socio-demographic criteria.
It is very easy on Facebook to waste money boosting posts. You need to ensure that you’re boosted posts are targeted at your ideal market.
Facebook Reviews
Like Google, Facebook allows for people to give you a review. This is a good way to allow people to get an independent opinion of your business and can have a positive influence on people’s buying decisions. However, you need to be very careful about Facebook reviews. Like on Google, you have no control in regard to removing a negative review. This means that people can maliciously post negative and disproportionate bad reviews about you via Facebook. This will be bad and will lower your average star rating, and you are almost powerless to rectify things. For example, a person in Australia has posted a review on the W3 Facebook page with one-star. We have never done business with this person, and they have not responded to our requests for an explanation. In a similar way, another client had a bad review posted on Facebook by a customer. They then moved heaven on earth to solve the person's issue; they asked the customer in the end if they were happy and they indicated they were completely satisfied and they also said they would remove the negative review. That was a year ago, the review is still negative and is still on the Facebook page.There is a setting in the admin area of Facebook that allows you to turn the system off.
About setting up your Facebook page, there are a number of features which you can turn on or off to customise your entry on Facebook. You need to consider what each does and how it will work in your overall promotional plan to get people from Facebook to your website.
You need to have the aim of getting people from Facebook to go to your website or contact you directly. Too many people think it is a good idea to plaster links to Facebook on their website.
If you think about it, getting someone to visit your website to find out about your products and services is the reason the website is there. As you have filled your website with the right marketing material to enable a person to make the decision to buy from you, there was no reason to send them to Facebook.
It’s a signpost, not a destination
All of the content that is on your Facebook page should be a summary of the content of your website with links to take the person from Facebook, to your website. Facebook is a signpost the website is the destination.In the previous item, we looked at how you can plan your News, by creating a schedule of items and subjects to use. How this relates to Facebook is that once you have created the items, you can reuse a summary of the item on Facebook with photograph and link it directly to that page of the website.
Facebook has the facility to allow you to schedule posts which means that you don’t have to do it in real time. For example, when I produce the W3 design newsletter I spend 15 minutes after we have completed and sent it out pre-posting all the news items as summary items on Facebook to show over the next month
Monitor / Ask / Review
The key to active Facebook marketing, like any marketing, is to ask new customers how they found out and made the decision to contact you. If you want to know if your Facebook activity is having any effect, you need to ask customers. This could be done in your customer satisfaction survey (if you do this) or as part of your sales pitch.It is essential to get this feedback as otherwise, you might spend valuable time doing things that are having no real effect on your business.