Reading HubSpot’s Facebook Tips really makes you want to login and start interacting more with people!
The key to Facebook success and promoting your brand is engagement. A major part of putting your business on Facebook needs to be interacting with customers, future customers and “fans” of your business and actively engaging in the community.
On Facebook, it’s important to make sure you are updating and sharing information on your profile that is engaging, entertaining, promoting and networking. Your wall is a great place to build community with your fans. Whether you are offering a promotion by asking them to “Check In” to your business, answer simple trivia questions, or asking for feedback, interacting with those fans is essential to making them feel important and a part of your brand so they no longer feel like “just a customer”. Creating a community is an essential part of brand building on Facebook. The customer can feel like they are participating and making a difference, therefore leading them to be more likely to use your brand or business. Participants are joining your page because they want to interact with you and feel engaged to your brand. Experimenting with your posts can be fun too! Video’s, pictures and blog articles oh my! This is a great way to mix it up and engage your customer.
Experts agree that posting in the morning and on weekends guarantees more success based on when people are getting on and checking out pages. Experts also recommend posting at least every other day, and make sure that you are tying your brand, events you’re participating in, and other social online outlets (Website, Twitter, YouTube etc.) to your posts, your fans are reminded of all the places you can be found on the web, making it more likely for them to visit you elsewhere online and in your place of business.
Keeping your posts relevant to what your business is doing is essential as well.
Do you have an event or special going on? Tell your fans about it! They want to know what you’re doing, when you’re doing it and that you are in high demand. Maybe you have nothing going on right now… and that’s ok! Post something about what’s going on in the world or pop culture. You can talk about how James Franco looked like he’d rather be cutting his arm off in a desert, than hosting the Oscars, or ask your fans what they are looking forward to when the weather gets nice.
No matter what and when you post, the key is to engage and make them feel a part of your brand. This is what social networking, especially Facebook, is all about. Keeping the customer, fan, and potential customer excited and wanting to be a part of what you’re doing by engaging in the community of your business. So, have you engaged lately?
Local restaurant SPIN! Pizza (which is soooo tasty!) does a great job of marketing on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/spinpizza They talk to folks on their wall and mix questions in with promotional items like coupons. Many of their coupons use humor like saying “Still another crummy weather voucher” so that the act of giving out a coupon is a little more appealing and catches your attention. SPIN! uses a lot of Facebook features, such as videos, reviews, discussions, notes, a storefront for selling tshirts, photos, etc. Why is this important? Because it gives the right person visiting their Facebook page quite a few things to look at and interact with, keeping an interested party there longer (and perhaps making them feel the desire to visit the restaurant while doing so.)