Your Facebook business Page (‘fanpage’ as it used to be called) is one of the most crucial elements of your social media campaign. However, most people involved in social media will tell you that getting ‘likes’ for their Facebook Page is one of their biggest challenges!!
You make a wonderful Page, you have great strategies planned for adding and updating content, you have put a policy in place regarding who can post what and how you will respond to particular types of comment ….. yet until you have some ‘likes’ and therefore an audience, you’re just kind of shouting into an empty theatre!!
So – what to do? It IS a bit ‘chicken and egg’ here, but one of the best first steps to promoting your Page is to give it a lovely Welcome or landing page, set as the default for every new visitor to land on. This should be like a mini-website, advertising all that is good about your Page and what your new visitor will gain by ‘liking’ your Page, with a big ‘call to action’ asking for that person to ‘like’ your Page with a big arrow to the ‘like’ button! Having this will help to convert a casual visitor into what used to be called a ‘fan’.
To add even more inducement to ‘liking’ your Page you can offer a freebie, discount or other special deal to all those who hit the ‘like’ button. Think about promoting this special deal offline too, to drive more potential ‘fans’ to your Page. By this I mean having a sign up at your business premises or leafleting your current customers to let them know all about it! You could also mention it in ‘phone calls and emails!!
Talking of emails, do you have a link to your business Page included in your email signature? Similarly, do you encourage people to ‘find me on Facebook’ with your vanity URL on all your printed materials (think business cards, flyers, order forms, invoices…) To take this one step further, why not put a QR code on here pointing directly at your facebook Page? Then smartphone users can get straight in and ‘like’ it!!!
Similarly, you want to have a Facebook box on your website and/or blog, so that readers here can ‘like’ your Page directly from the site!
However, we now have a really powerful way of promoting our Pages, thanks to the Facebook developers – the ability to post as a Page onto the Walls of other Pages (and to ‘like’ them!) This means that, as a Page we can now get involved in discussions on other active Pages much like we can in Twitter, so engaging with our targeted communities and offering them valuable content. As long as we are careful not to overdo this aspect and certainly not to spam other Pages, I can see this as being a really powerful way to get our Pages out there, sharing and interacting and getting known about!
These are my favourite tips for promoting your Page. What are yours?