Last week we detailed several reasons for a business to develop a Facebook Fan Page. With over 350 million ACTIVE users on Facebook at any given moment, you can imagine that the potential to tap into this market is enormous.
But I often consult to clients who have either been advised or started a Facebook page and then wondered why it hasn’t worked. Facebook Fan Pages, as with any marketing collateral or resource, require attention to work. Very rarely do we find any success in gathering a heap of random names and sending out random information and hoping someone might buy. A great example of this is direct marketing or mailbox drops. If you don’t provide a valuable message and subsequent follow up, you are doomed for failure. Facebook Fan Pages are no different.
So to save you some heartache, here are several things you need to be aware of before you develop a Facebook Fan Page.
Continuity = Success
Just like any conversation you engage in, you need to keep the sentences flowing. My definition of social media is a big collection of online conversations and connections. When you create a Fan Page, you need to be updating and creating content continuously to achieve success. How much? I think it’s reasonable to post 3 to 4 items a day. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? But we’re talking about 4 sentences – or thoughts – being uploaded to Facebook throughout the day. Don’t let the process consume you though.
Monitoring
Because we’re talking about creating a conversation, you need to spend some time monitoring what your Fans are doing and saying. If you don’t, you’re really just engaging in a one-way conversation, and there’s little value in this. True, it’s branding to have your logo seen continually, but true success on social media is found in creating the conversation.
Who and Why?
Define your target market before asking everyone to be your fan. The value is not in the ‘volume’ of fans but ‘quality’ of fans. I’d rather have 50 fans who are qualified buyers than 500 fans who are all there just to blast their own message.
So once you’ve worked out who you want to target and why, set about finding them on Facebook. Look at people’s profiles and conversations, judge whether they might be interested in getting to know more about you and you about them. Don’t dismiss the power of referral or the fact that fans may pass on positive things about you and your product to their friends.
Commitment
All the above points lead to my final point. Know that creating a SUCCESSFUL Fan Page takes commitment. It’s not a happenstance tactic. If you’re worried about having the time to do it properly, then don’t do it at all, rather than making a botched and frustrated attempt at it.
If you don’t know what you want to talk about or who you want to talk to, then again, don’t do it until you figure out these important details. Don’t be sucked into the trend of starting a Fan Page because everyone else is doing it.
Maintaining a Fan Page should take more than 30 minutes a day, and then maybe once a week, spend a little time crowd-sourcing for fans.
Make the commitment to engage your fans and provide meaningful content. Cant think what on earth you’d say 3 or 4 times a day? Surely you have an interesting service or product? Again, think of using Fan Pages to begin a conversation with your audience and you’ll quickly discover interesting things to talk about.
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