How not to do Facebook Marketing

More and more businesses are beginning to utilise the power of Facebook as part of their online marketing strategy – in fact 69% (source: zednet) of small business owners currently use it.

But if you want it to make a different to your business, you have to know what you’re doing; miss-use it and you could do more harm than good.

So what do you need to know to make sure you don’t make any Facebook marketing faux pas?

1. What’s the plan?

Setting up a Facebook business page is easy, perhaps a little too easy.

Frequently, a business will get all excited about using Facebook, set up a page and then sit back and wait. But without a plan about how you’re going to use your business page, its value to your business is limited.

Before you get going think about why you want to be on Facebook, is it for:

• Building brand awareness?
• Connecting with your customers?
• To gather a loyal following of fans?
• Improve your customer service by increasing your accessibility?

A plan is essential if you want to get the most out of it.

2. It’s not free

 Uh?

OK, there is no charge for setting up your Facebook business page; the cost we’re talking about here is the cost in man-hours for you.

If you want your page to be effective you must have someone (or a team depending on how popular and successful it is) monitoring it for you. Therefore it’s essential you keep this invisible cost in mind when you analyse the effectiveness of your Facebook strategy.

3. Joined up marketing

Your entire marketing strategy – on and offline – must be linked to get the best out of it.

Make sure all your marketing (website, brochures, flyers, business cards etc.) show your Facebook page address. Of course that also means that if you’re directing people to the page it must have content they need, but more about that later.

4. Measure

How do you measure your page’s effectiveness?

Well, you could take the number of fans into consideration, but that only goes someway to showing the popularity of your page. A more valuable measure would be the number of shares you get and comments on your page’s content.

If these are both high it suggests that you’re providing the kind of content your customers and fans want.

5. Getting the balance right

When it comes to the content you put out, you have to do a bit of research. Take a look at the response to your comments, posts, videos etc. Find the type of content your fans like the most and give them more of the same.

Also make sure your frequency of posting is right; too much and you could put people off; too little and you won’t engage them.

As you can see, marketing with a Facebook page takes a lot of thought and a well-devised strategy.

How are you using yours?

Are you happy with your engagement levels?

Leave a comment below and share your Facebook business page experiences.

Author: Sally Ormond. Copywriter and MD at Briar Copywriting Ltd