When you are passionate about what you do, believe in your capabilities and are confident that you are good at your job – you want to share it with everyone.
This enthusiastic attitude can allow you to boost your business by creating visibility online as well as generating enquiries and new business. It can also be your undoing if you get to the stage of annoying people.
We’ve all got that one friend on Facebook, who spends all day, every day promoting their business. Raving about how good they or their product are. Offering you free trials, special offers and not missing an opportunity to push things at you. Does it make you buy from them, or support them? No, you click the ‘unfollow’ link and remain friends, but delete their content from your newsfeed.
You then miss out on other important news that they might have, or the chance to cultivate a rewarding friendship, because you just cannot face another post about Herbalife, or whatever.
How to work best with Facebook
Now, I’m not an expert – well, not at social media at least – but there are several key pointers that I can give you until you reach the stage where you are prepared to pay an expert to help you. At that point I can put you in touch with someone who can help you take it to the next level.
- Have a public business page, which your fans can like. This is separate from your standard personal page and gives you a dedicated space to describe and promote your business. Unlike a personal page, you are not friends with your followers and fellow likers cannot see who else likes your page which means you maintain a degree of privacy both ways. Setting up a fake profile using the name of your business (as if they were a person) will get you suspended or deleted from Facebook when they finally catch up with you. It also means you miss out on some of the options available on pages, that are not on profiles.
- Ask your friends to like your page, using the suggest to friends option
- Occasionally link or share things from your page to your personal profile to allow people the option of reading your content.
- Tell your clients when you meet them to look for your page on Facebook, so that they can keep in touch and get regular updates.
- Do not create groups like ‘people who like ABC ltd’ and then join people to it without asking them first. This has got to be one of the quickest ways to aggravate people online, as their newsfeed is then jammed with comments from people they don’t know, about stuff they are not really bothered about.
Once you have done this, then you can decide how best to showcase what you do on your page and why someone would want to work with you.
It might be that you can put on ‘before and after’ photos of what you have done for a recent client – with their permission of course.
You could look at doing ‘Facebook Live’ videos straight from your page – so that your audience can start building a virtual relationship with you.
Remember that your page is public, and can be seen by anyone – so keep content relevant, specific and try to restrict controversial / political / religious views to your own private personal page – unless they are an integral part of your business. It is also wise to avoid bad language on your public page. You do not want to alienate potential clients because they misunderstand you or are offended by something you have said in jest!
Time to be useful
Your page should be useful to your audience. Besides describing what you do, and how they can contact you do your best to make it engaging, so as to allow it to be seen by as many people as possible.
Try to share relevant articles from other sources, being careful that you share from the original article so as to avoid dragging someone else’s comments and history to your page. The easiest way to do this is to click through to the article and then copy the full web address from the browser into your comment box to get the link. Some websites have a share to Facebook link, but this doesn’t always allow you to share it on your page, as opposed to your personal profile and it is best to keep things separate if you can.
If you see a relevant post on someone else’s page, bookmark it using the ‘save page’ option, so that you can look later to see if it is something that your audience would enjoy too.
Post regular status updates, but don’t make them too salesy. Some people find the best way to do this, is to talk (anonymously) about one client that they have helped this week. Be clear (but concise) about what the problem was and how you solved it. Add a picture if relevant or an eye-catching stock image from a free images site such as www.pixabay.com
If you have an event or promotion coming up – then use your page to promote it, thanking people when they book on by tagging them in the post, so that it shares to their friends and contacts.
Above all, think about how you can get all the amazing stuff you know, out there so that others can benefit from it. When they realise that you are the expert in your field, and what you can offer them – they will be drawn to you like a magnet!
