I recently talked to an ASU business school student about a special class project. He’s part of a group that’s giving promotional advice to a local business. The business has created a Facebook page, but the page isn’t living up to its potential. The student asked me for advice about “making a professional Facebook page.”
Here is the most important advice I can give to the ASU class, as well as to their “clients”:
While there are excellent reasons to hire companies like Social Identities to create customized cover banners, tabs and specialty pages for your Facebook business page, ultimately the professionalism of your page comes from your posts and responses, not your design.
Here are three very broad, very general, very important Facebook marketing concepts for business owners:
1. Facebook Rewards Interaction. The more often people comment on your posts, the more often they share your posts, and the more often they post directly to your timeline, the more often Facebook will show your posts to your followers.
Yes, it’s true: Facebook does not automatically show everything you post to your followers, even if your followers have elected to view the “most recent” items in their newsfeeds. The more popular you are in terms of interaction, not likes, the more often you will be featured.
You can encourage interaction by being interactive yourself. Fortunately for you, providing excellent customer service via your Facebook page will require you to interact with your Facebook followers, so you’ll be fulfilling two goals at once!
2. Facebook Rewards Live Posting. Facebook likes to feature status updates, photos and links that have been uploaded directly onto Facebook. Facebook feels kinda lukewarm about content that has been uploaded via social media services such as HootSuite and BufferApp. YES this is frustrating, because scheduling software makes our live much easier, especially when the ideal time to post something for viewing in Asia, Europe, or the US Eastern time zone is 3am YOUR time.
My best advice about this is to post “natively” — directly to Facebook — as often as you can, and schedule posts when you must.
Here’s an advantage of posting “live”: It gives you the chance to check for questions and comments on your timeline, and to respond to things that your colleagues and customers are posting.
3. Modern customers expect you to respond when they talk to you on Facebook. Don’t create a page if you’re not going to check it daily! Respond to questions on your page, even if you’re also going to contact the customer privately. “Like” all positive comments, thank people for compliments, and use criticism to show that you care about your customers. A responsive page encourages participation in conversations and promotions, which translates into more publicity, and hopefully more sales.
If you put your best efforts into writing your Facebook page post and comments, you will be rewarded by more attention, more loyal readers, and ultimately more sales.
Comments? Questions? Please share them below!
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This was helpful — thanks for sharing! I especially appreciate the “live posting” tip.
Thanks, Sandra! I’m working on a new post about Facebook Insights!
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