The Strategic e-Blog

Your business has a Facebook page, right? There is a good chance that at least a portion of your prospective customers have a profile on this social network and studies have shown most check it at least once per day, so why not go where your customers are? More users engage and have conversations on Facebook than on any other social network — even if Pinterest knocks Facebook down to the No. 2 spot, most of those Facebook fans will keep engaging, posting pictures of their cat and playing Farmville.

Once you have your business page set up, the next step is beginning to engage with your page’s fans and building your fanbase in the process. Here are a few simple ways to do so:

1. Develop a content calendar and stick to it. If you can’t think of what to write about, check out our previous article on creating blog topics for your business.
2. Post status updates regularly, but not too often. The main thing to keep in mind is that Facebook is different than Twitter. Your business can tweet several times per day, but Facebook users will get annoyed if a business (or a friend) posts too many status updates in one day. It clogs up a user’s news feed and will get you unliked. Once per week can be enough.
3. Upload photos that you are proud to share with your customers. You can set up separate albums for different aspects of your business, including your products, events your business took part in, and even your customers. Encourage comments on the photos and you can also allow customers to post their own.

Creating content that your customers can appreciate via social media in a way that they choose should be a part of any internet marketing plan.

If there is one statistic that should get you off the fence when considering whether or not to promote your business on Facebook, here it is:

800 MILLION ACTIVE USERS

That means that more than 1 in 10 humans on Earth have Facebook accounts. You will be hard pressed to name anything else, which that many people have in common, aside from say…feet. Every day, small businesses are finding ways to use this to their advantage. You should too.

So, how do you acquire business benefit from a glorified chat site?

Here are some ideas from companies that have gained measurably from employing some predictable as well as unconventional means to use the phenomenal power of this medium. While they are sizable national entities, there is nothing to prevent you from adapting these methods to your business model irrespective of size. It just makes good sense to emulate success.

The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board is using a successful strategy known as “Fan Gating.” Under this scenario, site visitors who become fans of the page are entered into a giveaway or sweepstakes. They offer new ones from time to time, often enough to grow their traffic. They also encourage people to post photographs, which will help them get a better EdgeRank on Facebook.

American Express developed a promotion by offering a $20,000 (not a typo) prize for small business owners who simply agreed to write a post. Their fan base grew considerably, as you might imagine. One of the things they learned from this exercise was that shorter posts (80 or fewer characters) received substantially more engagement than longer ones. Obviously, few small businesses are equipped to offer that kind of incentive, but you would be amazed how easy it is to get great results with a couple fewer zeros in the prize offer.

Lastly, Threadless is an eCommerce site marketing t-shirts online. Much of their appeal is to artists who create the designs, which are then chosen by fans. As you would guess, this process completely engages both the artists and the fans. Additionally, they have been able to build communities offline with meetups in cities all over the world. Could you use this concept on a smaller scale in your hometown? Absolutely.

Why do these companies provide these offers? Quite simply, with the incredible reach that only Facebook provides (for now, but keep an eye on Google Plus, the topic of our next post) and the fact that its appeal cuts across every age, gender, racial and socio-economic stratum, there is a very high likelihood that visitors will

Whether or not it should be called a revolution, there’s definitely a marketing shift taking place thanks to social media.  As the video below says, social media brings products to consumers and turns on its head one of the primary ways in which we, as consumers, find products.  If your business hasn’t yet setup a social media account, or at least gotten started with a simple Facebook business page, you’re missing a vital connection with your customer base.

Social media will continue to grow.  Of course it may taper off here and there as one service wanes in popularity and another takes over, but the underlying model will be in place for several years (at least until something new comes along to replace it).   What is that underlying model?  It’s something akin to active rather than passive marketing.  While it may seem like putting an ad on TV or on the radio is an active way of reaching out to your customers and prospects, it’s actually pretty passive.   Besides commercials during the Super Bowl, most ads are just perceived as filler, a chance to get up and walk away from the TV during a program.  Toss DVRs and Tivo into the mix, and it’s even harder to reach a TV audience.

When it comes to radio, you’ve got something of a similar phenomenon going on.  As more and more cars get outfitted with direct audio inputs, iPods and other media players will continue to take an audience away from radio and more toward their own selections of music, audio books and podcasts.   If you want to reach these plugged-in listeners, you don’t have a lot of choices that let you piggyback on their audio choices.  Of course you can underwrite a podcast, but that might not give you the kind of reach you want to achieve – nor enough room to deliver the type of marketing message you want to put out there.

Which is where social media steps in.  Unlike radio or TV advertising, which a passive audience can simply ignore, social media lets you engage actively with active participants.

Let’s say you’re in the business of guide books.  You can use social media to search and indentify people that are into guidebooks and then develop a strategy for targeting them.  In Facebook, it could mean a pointed advertisement, while in Twitter, it could mean following some people and building up a relationship.  That’s the difference with social media, it’s not always an instant message that’s delivered – and, ironically, sometimes the active marketing approach takes a bit more time than the passive one.

In the active marketing world of social media, invasive ads don’t always get received well – especially through a service like Twitter.  With social media it’s more important than ever to show some patience in marketing, but also to make sure that you’re using your marketing opportunity to share compelling information with your audience.  It’s a lot like building your social media brand – but it’s even more about building your social media rapport, which means you have to make sure that once you start building your social media persona, you continue to interact with people that respond.  That’s where the real work comes in, and that’s where a disciplined strategy is of the essence – without it, you can end up with a nice-looking Facebook or Twitter page that nobody sees after the initial push.