If you think facebook is only for teeny boppers and college kids, you need to open your eyes. Using facebook for business is the hottest way to build longer lasting relationships with your customers and generate heaps of traffic to your website and blog. If you’re wondering how to use facebook for business, follow these 5 facebook tips for business use:
Model your competition
If you’re not sure whether using facebook is appropriate for your business, I would advise you to see what other businesses are doing online that you could model. Does your competition have a facebook page or a facebook group? Are they using facebook for business, to generate traffic, to pre-sell their customers?
Determine what your outcome is, then look at businesses who are similar to yours and want to achieve the same outcome. Model them.
Build relationships
One of the major advantages of using facebook for business (or other social media for that matter) is the way you can interact with potential (and current) customers. Build relationships by engaging in the dialogue. Ask your customers what they like and expect before selling to them. Remember, one of the most important facebook tips for business use is to build trust. Once customers trust you, they will be likely to engage with the products in the top of your marketing funnel, especially if they’re free.
Be consistent
Like Blogging, being consistent in your interaction and presentation on facebook is one of the most important considerations when determining how to use facebook for business. There’s no point posting 25 notes this week, if you won’t be posting anything else in the next 2 months. The consistency of your engagement is one of the key facebook tips for business use.
If you’re already consistently chewing out content elsewhere online, consider connecting your blog to facebook to create an RSS feeds through your notes, or connect your Twitter account to facebook to syndicate status updates.
Make an offer
Many businesses wonder why the friends, fans and group members aren’t flooding in, as soon as they register on facebook. The answer is simple – you need to make an offer for users to engage with you.
Whether the offer is an association with your cool brand or business, a free report or eBook download, valuable interaction and tips from other group members or fans. The bottom line is – it has to be to someone else’s advantage to engage with your business on facebook.
Measure ROE
The most fundamental rule in using facebook for business is to measure the return on engagement. If you’re spending 5 hours a week on facebook and getting two new leads for your business, it’s not worth it. You’d probably be better of making 5 hours worth of cold calls.
So be sure to measure how much time, money and other resources you spend using facebook for business, and analyse whether you’re getting a good return. That said, give your trial on how to use facebook for business a little time to work – just because you only got 10 new fans the first week (and one of them was your Mom), it doesn’t mean you should stop trying to figure it out.
The fact is, facebook has over 150 million users and is continuing to grow, so it’s well worth your time figuring out how to use facebook for business. After all, you want to be where your customers already are, right?
What are your best facebook tips for business use? And was this post helpful? Please leave your comment below.