If your business is not using Facebook you may be missing out on one of the best available tools for generating website traffic, engaging with your customers, leveraging SEO opportunities and disseminating information to potential customers. At HerBusiness we have (over 20 years) employed all types of ways to communicate with clients including direct mail, face-to-face meetings, telemarketing, website and via email and eNewsletters. Since discovering the power of using Facebook Pages for business we’ve been able to leverage our marketing in ways that are cost effective, far reaching and effective.
Here are details on:
- How we use Facebook for business, and how you can too
- Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups
- Resources – to help you implement Facebook for your business
Facebook – A Powerful Tool for Business
Our Facebook Page allows us to:
- list and promote our events
- add photos from our member face-to-face gatherings
- add video training for members on how to better use our products and services
- conduct polls and surveys
- have discussions on relevant business subjects
- stream our Blog posts and Tweets
- communicate with our members
And we can do all this for FREE, and on one the most world’s most popular websites. Facebook is currently the third highest referrer of website traffic to the HerBusiness website (after direct traffic and google results). And, that’s because Google loves Facebook and social media… it does the SEO work for us.
Pages vs Groups – Which is best for you? You may have heard about Facebook Groups. How are they different to pages? When we first started using Facebook we formed a Group for HerBusiness members. This worked well (we could control group membership and send communications to this group) but had some disadvantages. The down side was that (because it was a closed group) it required us to administer the group and because memberships to the HerBusiness start and lapse at different times, we were giving ourselves an administrative nightmare having to manage who was entitled to be a part of the group at any point in time. After some research we started a Facebook Page (open to anyone to be a fan of and to see) and it was the right vehicle for us. (There are many more differences between Pages and Groups – so look at the Facebook website for details and determine what will best suit your needs.)
How we use Facebook to do Business (and how you can too)
Real Time Communication to Community Members We use Facebook to disseminate timely news relevant to women and business. Anything added to our Facebook Page is immediately part of the Facebook stream and can be viewed by fans (those who have subscribed to the page). Our ability to communicate with members is therefore more ‘real time’ than an email, a website update and a blog post.
Connect with Community Women from all over Australia have connect to us on Facebook. We advertise our Facebook page on our website, and in our email communications. Every time we send out a newsletter we get more an more people subscribing to our Facebook page.
Engage Community We’ve posted links to surveys on our page and had community respond to those surveys. Anything posted to our Facebook page can be seen by those that subscribe to that page. (We are yet to use it for Discussions but that’s coming next for us and we’ll likely stop using our exiting Forum software and instead uses Facebook’s facilities.)
Repurpose Valuable Content from Newsletters By adding to Facebook links to articles in our newsletters or on our website we are able to extend the life span of a newsletter and to get additional exposure for our authors and newsletter contributors. The articles live on our website so we drive additional traffic to our site by posting links on our Facebook page. We advertise our Facebook presence through online and offline media – which costs us nothing and gives people more ways to be in contact with us.
Foster a Community Feeling Members meet face to face at our Member MeetUp events. The photos that they send to us we post on Flickr and feed the images through to our Facebook page. This gives our page a human face and allows extra promotion of our member businesses (each photo is tagged with a link to their member profile on our Member Directory as well as their website details
Remember – Facebook Pages will only work if your audience is on Facebook. We have made deliberate efforts to introduce the benefits of Facebook to our clients and prospects and have helped them understand the benefits for their own businesses by hosting webinars about Facebook and posting articles on our website. And, you must allow time and resources to keep the page updated and current if you are to engage your community and attract new fans.
TODAY’S TASKs
- Start a Facebook Page for your business. (You’ll need to have a Facebook profile to create a page.)
- Get a good ‘how-to’ book like Facebook for Dummies to learn the ins and outs of using Facebook.
- Register for the Facebook for Business – free webinar, presented by Citrix on 14 October.
Resources Facebook for Dummies 10 Reasons to use the #1Social Network for Business
