Empowering Small Businesses on the Web

This week: Face­Book pages

I have been hav­ing a lot of luck lately with Face­Book pages, and have been cre­at­ing Face­Book pages for sev­eral dif­fer­ent clients.

This is a good thing, because as Copy­Blog­ger pointed out recently (www.copyblogger.com/facebook-killing-seo/), Face­Book is really chang­ing the game. With report­edly up to 250 mil­lion peo­ple on the site now, you really have to have a Face­Book strategy.

And lest you think it’s still just for the kids, the mem­ber­ship in the older demo­graph­ics has been going up steadily.

Face­Book has been referred to as a “walled gar­den,” because the vast major­ity of what goes on in there is not avail­able to Google. Tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing strate­gies such as SEO, or AdWords, sim­ply don’t work in there.

And it is this walled gar­den that peo­ple are flock­ing to, tak­ing refuge from spam­mers, and just a glut of information.

But now, on to the point of this: Face­Book pages offer an incred­i­ble oppor­tu­nity to businesses.

Any­one who has an account on Face­Book can cre­ate a Face­Book page, for their busi­ness, ser­vice, prod­uct, or even as a fan page for a con­cept or cause.

And, here is the ideal sit­u­a­tion: Your friends see your posts in their news feed, fall in love with it, and click “Become a Fan”. Then, their friends (who don’t even know you exist!) fall in love with it too, and then they become fans. And, as the old com­mer­cial goes, “and so on, and on, and so on,” until the whole world–or every­one who could pos­si­bly become a fan–becomes one.

Mean­while, lots and lots of them end up becom­ing clients, or buy­ing your prod­ucts, or sup­port­ing your cause, etc.

Does this make sense? Face­Book has made it really easy for peo­ple to share things with their friends. All you have to do is click “Become a fan,” and you’ll start get­ting updates in your news feed. All you have to do is click “Share”, and you can share the post with any friends you think will find it valu­able. And that is how it can spread.

Empha­sis on the word “can”. Like any­thing else, thought needs to be put into this, to do it right. To take full advan­tage of the situation.

I can’t cover every­thing here, but here are the basics:

1. Use Your Page Title. Your page title needs to be the front-line mar­ket­ing for your page. Ask your­self this: “If I knew noth­ing about this com­pany, but I was inter­ested in the topic, what would cause me to become a fan?” A great exam­ple of this is theK­buzz (www.facebook.com/thekbuzz). They use the page title to list both their brand, and their func­tion: “theK­buzz | Social Media and Word of Mouth Marketing”.
2. Make a Com­pelling Image. Pick a com­pelling, fun, and inter­est­ing image. Remem­ber that it needs to work for both the thumb­nail image, and for the larger image on the page. Play around.
3. Write for Your Read­ers. Oh, yes, that. Post some­thing, at least once a week. Remem­ber: do not hype your brand, prod­uct, or ser­vice. Instead, give peo­ple valu­able infor­ma­tion in an eas­ily read­able for­mat. Using the Notes tab in your page is an easy way to post content.

There’s lots and lots more, but that’s a start! Email me with any more ques­tions you may have!