People often wonder:
“How can I be effective on social media?”
“Can I use my personal Facebook page?”
“Do I need a Facebook fan page?”
“Do I need to be a part of a Facebook group or Facebook events, etc?”
So where does our focus need to be when building a business online? Well, here is what I know… It’s very important to understand that Facebook doesn’t allow us to operate a business under our personal profile. So, first things first, we urge you to create a business page or a fan page when considering to market yourself, your product, services or opportunity online and move your business stuff there when you’re working strictly on the business. Keep all personal matters on your personal profile to keep you from confusing your consumers. You can create Facebook ads and run them from your business account on your business page or your fan page; you can’t do that on your personal page. You can’t target your friends, new prospects, or build custom target audiences from your personal profile. You need to have an attractive fan page that is fluent, clean, and understands your brand direction.
Your Facebook Fan Page
The fan page you create allows you the flexibility to link your visitors to a website and contact page that offers your product, service or opportunity. More importantly it makes you look more professional. The best part is that every time you upload a video or create a Facebook live feed or a post, Facebook tracks all of those people who have seen your videos and posts, all of your fans and likes, etc. They collect all of these people into audiences that they call customer audiences who you can target with ads and marketing periodically.
Keep in mind that it may seem easier to engage on your personal profile and can be a little hard to transition in moving all your focus and activity onto a fan page; but, remember where you put your focus is where you will get the most results. So, just like your personal profile, it will take time to build a following; but, persistence and consistency is key. More engagement equals more results. Sometimes posting a video or post on your personal page and then enticing them to finish it on your fan page (like having a part 2), wanting to learn more about the topic you are discussing, and guiding them on how they can continue receiving more if they want more is a sure way to get them following you – if the content is relevant to their needs. It’s so important to condition your target audience to meet you on your fan page. Teach them to go there more than your personal profile. By doing this, you can abide by Facebook compliance and you’ll be able to do so much more with your business and your brand direction moving forward.
Make Your Facebook Profile Secure.
There are many different ways to make your Facebook profile safe and secure. To do this, you need to update your privacy settings. Click at the top right of any Facebook page and select Settings under the down-arrow. Click Privacy on the left. There will be different sections, so make sure you follow through and read all of the different privacy settings. You’ll notice there is a ‘Who can send you friend requests?’ section. I recommend choosing the ‘Everyone’ option. After you’ve completed the Privacy section, go back and click Timeline and Tagging on the left. Look for the setting ‘Review posts you’re tagged in before the post appears on your timeline?’ Switch that feature to ‘On’. This ensures that whenever someone tags you, you have control whether it goes on your timeline for your friends to see. Do the same for the reviewing tags option. This will prevent controversial topics and pictures, and possible profanity from automatically posting to your wall before you have the chance to remove it. As for the rest of the Timeline and Tagging options, I recommend choosing the ‘Friends only’ option to make sure the people viewing your posts are the people you’ve specifically added to your profile.
You also want to make sure that only you can view your friend list. To do this, go to your profile. Click Friends below your cover photo. Click at the top of the page and select Edit Privacy from the dropdown menu. Select an audience to choose who you share your friend list with on your profile. I recommend you choose ‘Only Me’. This is to ensure that there’s no cross-recruitment with anyone else, whether it be someone with your company or someone who is involved in other network marketing businesses.
Add Friends Daily!
Start by growing a community before you start promoting. The reason to do so is because you have to build trust within your community, and your community needs to trust that you would broadcast useful content that will add value to them. People will only buy from you when they have trusted your business. Only add people you know or people that you’ve built rapport with! You also want to be careful that you don’t add too many friends per day. A maximum of 20 people is good each day. Any more than that may risk you getting shut down. Adding or requesting no more than 20 people will protect you from the shutdown of certain features connected with your Facebook page. Profiling is also key in adding friends. Don’t just add anybody; look at their profile and see if they might be a good fit for your business or if they could use your product or service. Be careful when networking with busy professionals, whether they are in network marketing or traditional professions. Our place is to provide value for people’s needs.
Keep Your Facebook Profile Up-to-Date!
Constantly update it with work, school, favorite books, movies, pictures, etc. An updated profile shows your friends you are alive and happy with life. People like to work with happy people. Your personal page integrity is just as important so don’t get involved in controversy. People will check out your personal page before they follow your fan page and they will judge your business through your off-duty behavior. Remember, in your business you’re still selling yourself, not your company. Be careful when adding friends!! The people you add have the option to either ‘Accept’ ‘Ignore’ or ‘Deny’ your request to add them. If too many people click ‘Deny’, Facebook will temporarily shut down a few of your features; sometimes these features could be turned off for weeks at a time which would be a huge hit to your business for that month. The features Facebook can block you from using include your messaging and adding more friends. The reason Facebook does this is to prevent “fake” profiles or “spammers” on the site. This is why it’s so important to understand why having a fan page is better. It is expected to have higher volume of these kinds of transactions because you are conducting business. You also have a more unlimited following on your fan page, unlike your personal profile page which is limited to the number of friends you can have.
A great way to add new friends and to communicate with more people is to add yourself to Facebook groups. All you do is type in the search bar to look for them. For example you can search for any sort of hobby you enjoy and you’ll see a list of groups. Look over the group first to make sure there is frequent content being added, you don’t want to add yourself to a group that hasn’t posted in a year. After you are satisfied with the group you have selected, start communicating with people. Participate in the group often to make yourself familiar to other group members so that later you can add people you’ve been conversing with and eventually message them privately. You can add yourself to as many groups as you want! The more the merrier; but, make sure they are related to your product, service, or opportunity.
Be Consistent with Your Content.
You have to be constantly adding value and engagement on your page. Good content would certainly help you to do that, but good content is wasted and ineffective if you don’t have a supportive community to broadcast your content to. Content and community need to co-exist; which brings us back to the trust factor. Your audience needs to know you ARE NOT trying to “sell” them. Study your audience so you know when more people are tuned in to Facebook.
Typically the “hot” times to post are morning, noon and night. Post when engagement is the highest:
- 9am – 10am
- 1pm – 2pm
- 5pm – 7pm
- 12am – 2am
Posting Do’s and Don’ts
- Be careful not to over-post!! Spamming someone’s Facebook wall is a sure way to get them uninterested in ANYTHING you decide to post.
- Don’t have two or more things going on at once. Pick your brand and go with that. Know it. Fans should be able to take pride in following your page. There should be no confusion in your message.
- Save your best content for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
- Post lifestyle pictures often; people are more inclined to look at pictures than read a paragraph.
- Stay positive; people generally add happy people into their friendship circle and like to keep the negativity away.
- Post motivation; people like to be uplifted and a simple motivational post could draw a bigger audience your way. Everyone likes feeling good!
- Post only relevant topics that people want to share. Post using relevant news, trending topics and current events.
- Stay away from controversial topics; politics, religion, etc. are things people are very passionate about. You don’t want to start a debate with anyone because there’s difference of opinion. Keep it neutral.
- Post mostly images and upload videos directly to Live FB more than from YouTube. Facebook loves Facebook content.
- Do not post your corporate website; this is an automatic red flag to your audience that you are trying to sell them. Website links should be saved for individual, private conversations.
- Posting marketing pertaining to your product; when posting content about your company’s product, make sure you are compliant. Do not make any miracle claims, and you can’t use someone else’s testimony without their permission.
- Share your excitement about your business. Your posts should be 80% adding value to their needs and 20% business related per week. Share your excitement about your business! Talk from the heart when posting.
- Don’t focus on “make money with me” posts; focus most of your time on further developing relationships with your Facebook network. Most will be curious about the results you’ve shared from using your product or service.
Use Multiple Ways to Communicate.
- Try going live; Facebook has created a nifty feature where you can go live on video whenever you please, even if you don’t get a good number of viewers while you are live, Facebook automatically posts the video on your timeline so that people can view it later. So try going live and personally talk to your audience.
- Message friends DAILY; the easiest way to build rapport with people is to show you care about them. Send personal messages to friends and let them talk to you, ask them questions. People like to talk about themselves, so always be the listener of the conversation.
- Frequently “like” and comment; engaging on your friends’ posts is important. The more you interact with them on their posts, the more they interact with you on yours. This is also good because you’ll start to become familiar with their friends whom you communicate with and eventually you can add those people you converse with, expanding your audience and your market.
- Following up with “likes.” When people like your content, be sure to follow that up with a message. Start talking about what you posted or simply ask what they liked about it. Directly invite friends and email contacts to like page. Have a “like my page” email in your auto-responder.
- When messaging friends, try to steer the conversation to address their needs and desires and it will eventually lead them to what you’re offering, so see if you can help.
- Be mindful of your friends’ time. Don’t spam them with group messages about generic business information.
- Don’t hype the product, service or opportunity.
- Speak in words that others can trust. Take your time and share benefits in small amounts, you don’t want to overwhelm them.
- Facts tell; but, stories sell! Instead of being fact driven about your business, share the emotional side by posting pictures of you at events and telling how they have changed your life. Social proof is what they are looking for. So if it’s about your product, service and opportunity, lead them to your business by finding their pain point, their needs and desire and fit them into whether it makes better sense for them to try your product/service or the opportunity. Find out if they are open to taking a look at something if it can make them more money than what they are currently doing.
All in all, Facebook marketing is about building trust and relationships, not spammy ads blasted to everyone with an account. The payoff is in the effort you make to get to know people and to cultivate a following. Once you get this topic down, be sure to check out my other blog 5 Basic Steps to Facebook Messenger Marketing, another tool to boost your prospecting efforts on Facebook.
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