How to Put Your Best Facebook Face Forward

STEP ONE: WHAT IS YOUR GOAL?
Example: “I want to build my audience on Facebook so my end result is to sell more product or services.”  As the 1980’s Heart song proclaims “I can’t sell you what you don’t want to buy”. I know, I know you still hope to convert people but that’s another article for another day. Let’s just concentrate on the easy get. Those people that fit into your target category (target market) and we can work on the others after you build your foundation.

First identify your population, is it new moms that you are trying to market food delivery services or is it busy millennials that you want to advertise your spacious new coffee lounge? Next you must start thinking like that population, what would you want if you were in that target population? Think like a psychologist, what does it feel like to be in that population and what would you want as it to pertains to your product or service? Eat, breathe, sleep like you are in your target audience. Start collecting ideas, thoughts and articles that you can use later in all Social Media outlets.

STEP TWO: HOW TO START OUT BY SIMPLY ASKING. PLEASE HELP US BUILD OUR FOLLOWING.
On your home page, ask your users to like your page. “If you like what you see, do us a favor and like our page, we promise you won’t be disappointed.”

Put your information everywhere, make it attention grabbing, or quirky. People are looking for different or unique pages. They are also looking for trustworthy pages, so make sure you always follow through with any promises on your page, whether that’s updating on a promised blog post or announcing a winner in a drawing. Ask for feedback from customers or winners of a drawing. Real people equals real trust. Also, make sure you have the Facebook like box on your website, you want to make it as easy as possible for your website users to also follow you on Facebook.

Another great place to start is with your own personal page, ask you friends and family to like and share your page, this also builds on the trust element of Facebook.

Next appeal to the Bloggers. Ask them to try your service or product and give feedback. Give back to the Bloggers, share their content, a little good Karma can go a long way.

STEP THREE: WHEN AND HOW OFTEN?
Too little and you fall away and don’t get the interest. Too much and it gets tiring. There is a balance and for every product/service there is even another fine line between too much and too little. So what’s the perfect formula? Well that’s business specific and what kind of audience you are trying to attract. If you are selling a weekly cleaning service, you want to get your audience reminded enough that they are pushed to contact you for a cleaning. For example, sending funny memes out about the mother in law showing up unannounced to your home, get a cleaning service and no need to worry. If you are a yearly service such as duct cleaning company maybe send out useful tips on house maintenance, peppered in with comical memes about a weird smell and then include information on your services. 

The point is to keep people engaged with your page. You want them to stay with your page, so you don’t want to constantly bombard them with buy buy buy, be helpful or funny too. As a whole, the best days to post are Saturday and Sunday, closely followed by Thursday and Friday. So, a good approach would be to post more often those days with your most important content. You should still be posting all the days of the week as well but make sure your focus is on Thursday through Sunday. Best is to use Facebook scheduler if you need to pre-schedule posts.

Or use programs such as Hootsuite or Buffer that you can fill in content to automatically post can be helpful as well but beware if you choose to only use these type of services and not add some little random extras to your posting, your followers may decrease.

STEP FOUR: KEEP YOUR FACEBOOK SUBSCRIBERS INTERESTED
Run topic appropriate articles often and keep them clicking to your site. Offer drawings for free services or products, keep them coming back for more. It’s all about engagement. Get your followers to like, comment and share, so that your posts continue to show up in their news feeds. Ask a question or take a poll/survey. Get people to participate and invest in your page. I know as a Facebook user, I have learned that if I want to see more of a page show up in my news feed, I have to make sure I am an active participator on their posts. When a person likes your page, there was something that initially drew them to it.

First and foremost, have a great profile picture.

Second, is to have great Facebook cover art. It should be representative of the type of business that you are.

Here is a little video for more ideas.

If you are running a birthday party event planner business, it should have a bright, cheery background picture, with a fun picture of yourself or one of your entertainers. If you own a body shop, a background picture of good looking repaired or painted cars, with a profile picture of your mechanics, arms crossed and looking confident or with big friendly smiles. 

Another good idea is to have engaging photo images to go with your posts. Make sure you incite a positive emotion, happiness, wonderment or excitement, just maybe also a little safe danger. Do you get what I mean, when I say safe danger? Something that might be just a little outside the norm but not so crazy that it leaves out a bunch of people. Maybe a picture of a person booking a same day flight, I mean who amongst us can actually do that? But what a dream that would be! Most of us have responsibilities but wouldn’t it just be wonderful to ignore that for a minute and live a little dangerously? Maybe a picture of a sexy red dress and really red lipstick advertising to group of ladies you are selling personal training to.You want them to feel alive again and start dreaming about how they can feel good and positive about themselves. It’s all about pulling the person in and making them feel emotional to your post and that will keep them coming back for more. That’s the ultimate goal for all businesses is customer retention as the foundation and steady new customer growth to follow.