Facebook All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition (2014)

Book IV. Building a Business Page

Chapter 4. Building Your Community

In This Chapter

Understanding how your readers use Facebook

Knowing your goals (so you know when you’ve met them)

Using different kinds of updates to appeal to your followers

Taking care of customer service

Using social media as an extension of your marketing strategy is mandatory these days. If you don’t use Facebook or Twitter or at least a blog, you’re missing out on key engagement with your customers and potential customers. Your business page can be an important part of your marketing strategy and must fit with other efforts to attract followers. When people become followers and are welcomed into your community, they are more likely to convert to paying customers.

By setting up your business page, you recognize that you need to market where your audience is … and they're on Facebook. Your business page can reinforce your brand and bring a new level of interaction to your customer relations. In fact, some businesses are so excited about using Facebook that they see only the potential for broadcasting their message. After all, your business and its products are phenomenal, and now you can tell everyone in the world! One of the key things to remember about Facebook is that although you own your page, your followers own the space. You control what you share, but your followers control how they consume it. If followers decide that you’re sharing too often or not sharing content that interests them, they can hide your status updates from their news feed (or, worse, Unlike your page).

In Book IV, Chapters 1 and 2, we show you how to create your business page. What you do when you have your business page set up matters, and it's not a “set it and forget it” deal. One mistake some marketers make when including Facebook in their strategy is expecting a fast return on investment. Social media (whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, a blog, LinkedIn, or another tool) requires time to develop a community. Any time you use social media, your space needs attention and interaction; otherwise, it loses its value.

In this chapter, we show you a few tips and tricks to interact with your followers so you both see value. We give you some advice about keeping your audience engaged and some things to think about for the future of your business page.

The marketing advice we offer throughout this book is solid, but it’s just an overview. If you want to delve into Facebook marketing tactics, we suggest you check out Facebook Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Amy Porterfield, Phyllis Khare, and Andrea Vahl (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), a comprehensive guide to building a business presence on Facebook.

Determining Your Goals and Objectives

You shouldn’t assume that your business page isn’t as important as your other advertising and marketing venues. You’re building community and loyal followers here; in some cases, Facebook allows you to introduce your product to a much wider audience than you may have had access to previously. Before you interact with these existing and potential customers, you need to have a plan — just as you have a plan for your other advertising and marketing efforts.

Your plan should include a set of specific goals, a means to achieve those goals, a deadline for the goals, and a measurement for how well your efforts worked. Goals are useful when they are specific:

· Vague Goal: Get more people to Like our page.

· Specific Goals: Gain 25 Likes in one week. Have 50 new Likes on our page by the end of the month. Have five comments on posted status updates this week.

The goal of wanting more Likes is too broad. How do you know when you’ve achieved your goal? When you’ve had one more person Like your page? By being more specific, you make one vague goal into several specific goals that allow you to build on your successes. With specific goals in mind, you know exactly what you’re working toward and how long you have to achieve those goals.

The next step is defining a strategy for reaching the goal in the allotted time. That strategy is what the rest of this chapter is about.

As you determine your goals, consider the following questions:

· How do you or your company want to use your business page?

· What are you hoping to achieve by using Facebook? For example, do you want to become an authority in your niche? Increase sales? Introduce yourself to a new market?

· How do you want to engage with followers?

· How do you want followers to engage with you?

· Will you share industry-specific information from many sources?

· Will you promote your products or services?

You want quality, not necessarily quantity, when it comes to Likes. It’s better to reach 10 people who really want to buy than 1,200 who just don’t care. As well, you need to define why you want followers. You can have thousands, but if they aren’t interacting or buying, what’s the point?

Marketing goals generally equal sales, but people using Facebook (and social media in general) don’t like to be bombarded with sales pitches. Although Facebook is a public forum, users consider it their private space. Users choose who they interact with and how. If those interactions become uncomfortable (for a business page, that means spammy or intrusive), users can Hide, Unfriend, or Unlike the person or page making them uncomfortable.

Does that mean you shouldn’t market or sell your products or services on Facebook? No. You can sell, but make your pitches relevant and don’t make every status update a pitch.

When you do pitch, provide a call to action and provide a link that allows the reader to complete the action. In some cases, you may also want to include a picture, and provide context in your status update of how to use the product or show why it’s relevant to your followers.

Establishing Your Authority

To build your community, you need to give people a reason to come to you. One way to do that is to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. To build authority, you need to fulfill a need for your audience: Solve a problem for them, entertain them, or educate them.

When users trust you to give them relevant information, they begin to look to you regularly for that information. As you share the information, they interact with it by clicking the Like button or commenting. If the information is particularly relevant, readers will also share the information with their own networks — essentially giving the content their stamp of approval. When followers do that, their friends see that they are endorsing your content, and they may be more likely to engage with (and possibly share) your content too.

Developing a large, loyal community takes time, but it’s not necessarily hard. The bottom line is respect. If you respect your followers and their needs, they’ll appreciate you. As you nurture your community, consider this advice:

· Build trust. As you build your community, keep in mind that you are building trust. You can gain your readers’ trust by making your interactions primarily about them. Before you start any marketing campaign, know your target audience, know what they want, know how you can help them, and know how you can use that interaction to further your own goals as well. Use this information to craft status updates that address your audience’s needs, include a call to action, and then provide a way to complete the action.

· Pitch genuinely. Use the 80/20 rule: Spend 80 percent of your time listening and 20 percent talking, or 80 percent sharing information that is relevant to your audience and 20 percent asking them to buy. Asking your readers to buy isn't a problem — your followers are probably coming to you because they like your product or service. Selling is a problem when you only ask your followers to buy and don’t give anything in return.

When you do sell, not giving your followers a way to complete a transaction is also a problem. Take advantage of the followers who are interested in your product. Give them a chance to purchase your goods or services by linking directly to a product in your online store or website.

· Listen. Ask for your readers' opinions and pay attention to what they reference when they comment on your updates. Listen to your audience in other venues such as Twitter or your blog as well, and introduce interesting conversations from those venues to your followers on Facebook.

Establishing Social Proof

When your followers come to rely on you for a specific purpose, you’ve gained authority. When you have authority, you have earned your followers’ trust and they’re likely to offer social proof of acceptance to their friends and others. Social proof occurs when members of a community see others engaging with and sharing content, check it out for themselves, and — if they like the content — share it with other communities of which they’re a part. If people are consistently commenting or sharing on your business page, that’s proof that other people like your product or service. When a new follower arrives, that social proof reinforces the person's decision to be there and interact with you.

When people visit your business page, one of the first things they look at is the interaction there. If people only see posts from the page admin and no interaction (Likes or comments), the page appears one-way. On the other hand, if people see conversation (even limited interaction with a few Likes or comments spread out), that tells the visitor that people are indeed reading what’s being shared and are investing their time in the community. One of the best ways to increase your social proof is to provide shareable content, which we go over in the next section. (See Chapter2 of this minibook for directions on how to set your timeline to show posts from everyone, not just your business page updates.)

Creating Shareable Content

An unattended business page leaves a negative impression on your visitors — and they are less likely to Like it — because they assume it’s not relevant or cared for. Updating your business page status regularly is important. How often you update your page depends on your audience and your niche.

You don’t want to litter people’s news feeds with irrelevant information multiple times a day. Instead, focus your updates on topics relevant to your niche (and your audience’s needs) and post them as needed. Some days may see more updates; other days will see fewer updates. We find that one or two posts per day seems to be ideal, but small businesses can sometimes get away with three or four updates a day. (Scott posts to the Post Planner page at least six times per day, with different types of posts, and sees great engagement.)

To figure out when your followers are most likely to interact with your updates, check your Facebook Insights to see which updates are garnering the most engagement. (Book V, Chapter 3 explains how to use Insights.) Experiment with posting in the mornings, afternoons, evenings, and on weekends, and then check your Insights again. Did you see a difference in how or when your followers engaged with your content? Consider when your audience is most likely to be on Facebook. They’re probably on Facebook before work, possibly during their lunch hour if Facebook is allowed through their work firewall, and again in the evenings after dinner. We’ve found that Sunday evenings can be interactive as well, but not all companies are willing to work on Sunday night.

Studies have shown that most people Like or follow a brand because they want exclusive deals, discounts, and promotions. When you’re thinking about ways to interact with your followers, consider rewarding customers for being followers by giving them periodic perks.

Sharing instead of broadcasting

When visitors Like your page, they almost never go back to your actual business page (unless you provide a specific link or call to action in a status update; we cover that later in the chapter). Instead, your followers rely on their news feed to see status updates from friends as well as business pages. You can imagine how important those news feeds are and why you don’t want to be hidden from anyone’s stream.

Most users agree that they don’t see Facebook as a place for businesses to market to them. Rather, they see Facebook as a place to connect with a business they enjoy. Your followers don’t want you broadcasting your message to them all the time, which can be hard for a marketer to hear. Your main goal as a marketer is to share a message with others, and broadcasting is an efficient way to achieve that goal. Social media is changing the way you reach that goal by putting the power in the audience’s hands instead of yours.

As you share content, remember to make it relevant to your audience. Put the information in context as it relates to them. Present the information in such a way that your readers feel like you found this information specifically for them. Your audience will eventually look to you as an authority in your niche.

To build a loyal community, you must offer quality content relevant to your audience’s needs. If your content is good and truly meets the needs of your audience, you’ll find that they often share it with their friends. When you consider what to include in your status updates, think about sharing the following:

· Links

· Photos and video

· Questions

· Calls to action

Sharing links

RSS feeds have been popular for many years. RSS, which stands for Real Simple Syndication, is a way for people to be alerted when new content is published on a blog, for example. In the past few years, however, people have come to rely less on RSS feeds and more on links to content shared by their friends and colleagues via platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Links shared by people you trust provide social proof — you believe the link has worth because someone you trust shared it with you. When you establish your business page as an authority in your niche, your followers come to believe the links you share have worth. If they also see colleagues or friends sharing or commenting on those same links, the social proof intensifies.

Here are a few best practices for sharing links on your business page:

· Take the time to provide context. Give your readers a reason to click the link by explaining how they can benefit from the information shared in the linked article. Without context or a short note from you, you’re just posting a link — and that appears spammy. With so much questionable content floating around, links by themselves are suspect and your readers are less likely to click them for fear of spam.

· Remember your goals. If your goal is to encourage your followers to interact with your content, don’t send them away from your business page. A link takes people away from Facebook, and they may or may not return after they’ve read the article. If they do return to Facebook, they may not return to your update to Like it or comment.

On the other hand, if your goal is to share information to gain authority as the go-to page for your niche, it’s not as important if followers don’t come back to comment or Like. Your job in this instance is to provide the tools for your audience to stay updated on niche-specific information. Plus, if you're trying to drive traffic to your own website, your first goal is not interaction on the Facebook content but getting people to go to your website.

· Use a link-shortening and -tracking tool. This point dovetails with the previous point. If your goal is to educate or disseminate or curate information for your followers, you may find yourself sharing many links that take followers away from your business page. When you send people away from your page to read an article, they may not return to your page. If they don’t return, they won’t comment or Like the link, and it’s hard to tell if anyone interacted with your content.

You can check your Insights (see Book V, Chapter 3) to track how many clicks a link received. If you want more data, consider a link-tracking service. By using a link-tracking service such as bitly (http://bit.ly), you can see how many people click your links. Many times, we’ve seen no comments or Likes on a status update with a link only to check bitly and find that the link got 30 clicks. That information tells us that followers are using the content and interacting with it, even though we can’t see that on Facebook.

Figures 4-1 and 4-2 show a business page and a bitly dashboard, respectively. You must be logged in to your free bit.ly account to see analytics. The link shared on the business page doesn’t appear to have any interaction. But if you look at the bitly dashboard, you see that that link has had ten click-throughs, which means ten followers interacted with that content.

Figure 4-1: A business page doesn’t show whether people click your links.

Figure 4-2: Link-tracking tools like bitly show how many people clicked on a link.

Using photos and video to encourage sharing

If you think about how you interact on Facebook, which posts are the ones that inspire you to click most often? The answer is probably updates that include video or pictures.

Facebook displays photos nice and big so followers can see product pictures easily. And with videos right there in your news feed, you don’t have to click around and later try to resume your place in the news feed.

Sharing visual content is easy! If you share interesting photos and video your followers love, they can just click the Share link and their friends will see the content as well. As more and more users become mobile, only users' photos and videos stand out and catch attention. For more information on how to use photos and video with Facebook, flip to Book II, Chapters 3 and 4, respectively.

Asking questions

When people use Facebook, they scan and click quickly. Anything that takes more than a few seconds to consider may be lost in the shuffle. As a result, you should interact in specific ways to ensure that you have a high rate of engagement.

Asking questions is an excellent way to engage followers, but only if done correctly. Because Facebook readers move from one update to the next quickly, you have to make your questions scannable and easy to answer. Here are some tried and true options:

· Yes/no questions: These short questions require a one-word answer, but leave room for your followers to expound on their point of view if they desire. Consider these two questions:

Question 1: Do your kids earn an allowance?

Question 2: What do you think about kids earning an allowance?

The first question is a simple yes-or-no answer. It’s easy and it’s fast. Followers can choose to expand on their answers, but yes or no will suffice. The second question requires a little more thought. If followers see that question in their stream, they may answer it in their heads but probably won’t take the step of crafting a response because they have more complex thoughts on allowances in general.

· Either/or questions: Similar to yes/no questions, an either/or question requires only that your followers respond with their preference. They don’t have to include an explanation if they don’t want to.

· Fill-in-the-blank questions: Give your followers a prompt and ask them to share a word or two to complete a sentence. Add your own answer as well! Your followers will appreciate that you’re interacting with them.

· Polls with limited answers: A great way to get people talking is to pose a question to your followers and provide specific answers for their feedback. It doesn’t get any easier than that. If you keep your choices limited to around two to three, your followers can scan the question and answer and then quickly comment with their preference before they move on to the next status update.

If you’re looking for an easy way to come up with questions to ask, check out the Status Ideas Engine from Post Planner, at www.postplanner.com. It contains thousands of ready-made questions and ideas to post to your page.

Don’t be afraid to stray from your normal topics or to use humor in your questions. Scott’s audience on Post Planner is primarily the social media marketing crowd. However, posting only information about Facebook would get boring, so Scott mixes in humorous posts or motivational posts that don’t require much thought but cause people to react and engage, as shown by the number of Likes, comments, and shares in Figure 4-3).

Figure 4-3: Don’t be afraid to stray off-topic to encourage new interaction.

Sometimes the best way to know what your audience wants is to ask them. When you know what your audience expects, needs, or wants, you can better determine which type of information to share and which products to promote. To begin, you may want to ask your followers questions such as

· Which social media networks do you use?

· How do you use your product or service?

· What information would you like to see?

· What other pages do you Like and interact with frequently?

Make note of how your followers respond, and use that information to help plan your page updates and blog articles (if you keep a blog).