Tips for Boosting Fans on Your Facebook Business Page

Whether you like it or not and use it for your business or not, Facebook is the real deal. Statistics show that 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know and that the majority of consumers spend more after a friend’s recommendation than they do shopping on their own. The key to spreading your business gospel is acquiring an ever-growing audience—your Facebook fan base. Here are some tricks of the trade.

1. Determine if Facebook is, in fact, a good fit for your business.

It is possible that your customers don’t participate in social media. If your market is the senior crowd, for example, your efforts might be better spent elsewhere. However, a Facebook page is free and there are some seniors who are savvy to social media. In addition, seniors have children and grandchildren who do use the medium and can help you connect indirectly with your market. See, you’re not really off the hook.

2. Engage with your fans.

Unless the information you provide is consistently entertaining or useful, if you don’t engage in conversation with your fans, sooner or later they’re going to fall off, which leads to them forgetting about you, which leads to fewer sales and fewer recommendations. Thank your fans when they compliment your service. Apologize when they criticize. Talk to them about everything in between.

3. Offer your fans incentives to stay current with your page.

Statistics indicate that the majority of Facebook business fans are so to begin with for the incentives: discounts, coupons, contests to win products or services, etc. Give your fans reasons to keep up with your business other than simply the social aspect of the medium. Along these same lines, offer incentives for becoming a fan. Again, coupons and other discounts work well but also newsletters and email blasts promising those same discounts work too.

4. Take advantage of the social aspect of the medium.

There's no stronger recommendation than one from a personal friend. Add the “Share” button to every post you make, and, again, if it makes sense, offer incentives to fans for sharing your post.

5. Advertise on Facebook.

As incredible as this sounds, Facebook is fast on the heels of Google and Yahoo for the most visited site in cyber space and is expected to overtake them both within a year or so. That doesn’t mean that people are using Facebook in the same way they use search engines. But it does mean that Google will likely not be the largest potential pool of new and existing customers forever. How you market to that pool via Facebook, of course, differs than how you market to them via the giant search engine. But take advantage of the audience. Again, it’s free.

6. Consider creating a landing page for your Facebook fan page rather than the run-of-the-mill comment threads that comprise most business pages.

New visitors and fans can easily click through to the comment threads, but a landing page is a great way to offer additional information about your business as well as create a call to action or highlight discounts, coupons and contests, etc.

The technology of social media is evolving incredibly fast and there’s a school of thought that Facebook might peter out in the not-too-distant future and be replaced by … who knows what. But at Ryan William’s Agency, the consensus is that it ain’t happening this year, and likely not next, and probably not the year after that. So, in the meantime, what other marketing and advertising vehicle have you got that potentially can reach the numbers that Facebook can, and for free? Even if you’re one of the believers that there is an end in site for Facebook, there’s still a whole heck of a lot of gravy left in this train before the theoretical demise of its usefulness. And at Ryan William’s, we can show you how to squeeze every last drop out of it.