Social Media Engagement vs Sales

Today I decided to start another mini series here on the 210 blog.  It was birthed out of cleaning out my Page Suggestions box on my Facebook Profile.  You know what I mean, all those wonderful requests you get to join pages like “My Dog is Cuter than Yours” & “Save the endangered Grass.” In addition to the silly requests, you also get invited daily to join pages of your friends & connections on Facebook.  This post talks about ways to get more people converted to liking your page & participating on it.

Before I share what can help increase the number of people joining your Facebook Page, let me first share my requirements to click like and join your page.  If your page can accomplish any one of the following things, it stands a good chance I will like it.  It has to do one of these:

1. Engage me on a topic I am interested in.
2. Give some sort of information that can be helpful to me.
3. Be involved with a charity/cause topic that interests me.
4. Be different & unique with what they offer that captures my attention.
5. Be the page of a good friend who I enjoy helping and am interested in what they might say..

So as I was clearing out the 428 invitations to join pages, I decided it was time to turn it into a blog post as I found several pages (about 419) that didn’t follow any of these rules.  Here are 6 ways to convert guests to fans of your Facebook Page.

Engage Me at the Title

The first thing that makes me not want to join a page is the title. If you want to attract more people to your page and get them interested in what is happening there, you need to have a great title.  You need to pick this wisely in the beginning because once you set the page title, you can never change it.

We work with a lot of clients in the real estate industry and when they go to set up pages, they normally set the title to something like the one to the right.  I hid all this person’s incriminating info to protect their identity.  Trust me when I say they are not alone with creating a page title that is simply, their name, Realtor.  In this case, they didn’t even use REALTOR® properly.  But that is a whole other conversation.  When you are trying to get your friends on Facebook and all of their friends to join your Facebook Page, you need to start with an interesting title.  The only people that will be joining this page are those that are friends of this agent.  As you can see, so far the page only has 1 fan.  If you make the page more about an area of interest, a specific topic or idea, people will be more willing to join.  When the title sounds like a sales pitch, or business card, people are not as quick to join and participate.

Ask ME Questions

One of the best ways to get interaction & people talking about your Facebook page is to ask questions that people can’t resist answering.  For example, one of the pages I created has over 90% of the posts I place just being questions.  The interaction level on this page is really good and people love to find out more information not just from me.  I can go to this page once every 3-4 days and ask a simple question and the fans of the page give enough answers helping the group find new & interesting things without me having to do all the leg work.  This page has grown on it’s own to over 650 fans and I have done hardly anything to accomplish this.  I might spend a total of 10 minutes per week on the page.

Too many times do I see Pages turned into just another aspect of broadcasting all the info you have on your website which can be helpful, but nobody wants to just read all about you unless you are an internationally known brand or celebrity.

Include Posts by Others In Your Feed

One of the simplest things you can do on your Facebook Page is change the settings as to what shows up in your feed.  The default is always set to just the things said by the page.  In a matter of seconds you can change that to show what the page & the fans of it are saying on it.  I think this is a major component to whether people feel important on the page.  Think about this a moment: What is the best type of advertising for a business? Word of mouth from happy clients! If you hide the fans that are saying great things about your business, you are overlooking a very powerful source of marketing.  Change the settings to show both, and then monitor what is said.  I will give you a fair warning that you may get spammed by this, which seems to be taking place more often lately.

The one comment I get when I mention changing to this option with a client is “what if someone posts something negative about us?” You do run the risk of something like this happening whether it is true or not.  But, this is also a great way to grow your business by how you handle these types of situations.  I have seen way too many companies handle it incorrectly, but if you can address the complaints timely and properly, it shows that your business is paying attention & cares what your clients think.  Doing this type of customer service can take a business from good to excellent over night.

Respond! Respond!

Replying to what people say on your Facebook page is HUGE.  Every time a fan writes something on your wall, you get free advertising as it shows up on their wall activity.  So, if that person leaves 5 comments, there are 5 links back to your page promoting it to their friends.  When the friends see that, they become curious and will come visit the page too.  You also make the fans of the page feel important when they are receiving direct contact from you.

A good friend of mine, Mike Mueller calls this comment tennis.  Whenever someone comments on his page, he makes sure to always go back and be the last commenter on anything.  This can become a little time consuming if your page starts to take off, but the rewards from doing so can be great.  If your page grows so large that you feel you are spending too much time doing this, then add an additional admin to the page to help you monitor/respond to everyone.

Be More Vain

Facebook introduced the use of vanity URL’s several months back and so many still are unaware of them.  What’s a vanity URL?  Well, it a simpler way to tell people to get to your new page.  Instead of trying to tell someone to visit our Facebook Page by visiting: http://www.facebook.com/210consulting?v=app_4949752878&ref=ts I can simply say, go to http://facebook.com/210consulting. Not only does it look nicer on a business card and email signature, but it is also easier to remember.  To set up a vanity URL for your page, you need to have at least 25 people who like your page.  Once you reach this number you can then visit http://facebook.com/username and claim your URL.

Make sure you spell your new vanity URL properly and that you are NOT violating any trademark laws! You remember what happened to this rather large group of 47,000 fans.  Facebook will not change the links once you select them, so take some time to think this through before claiming yours.

Get Custom Landing Pages

What a better way to engage your new fans than with a custom landing tab on your Facebook Business page.  The possibilities on these tabs are virtually endless.  I’ve seen everything from the implementation of welcome videos to mini versions of a full website built inside a tab.  In fact, with the write person creating your tab, you could even do e-commerce right inside your Facebook page.  These tabs can be branded to match your site and build your branding inside Facebook.  These aren’t always the simplest things to build, the take a pretty good knowledge of HTML & FBML to create.  My suggestion is to hire a professional to build one for you.  For a few hundred bucks you can have something great built that can pay off for itself in no time if it increases your business.  If you need help setting a custom landing tab, contact us, we know the best in the biz at making these.

If you implement these 6 simple steps into your Facebook Page strategies you will begin to see the conversion of people to your page increase greatly.  If you have any questions, or need any more assistance with a Facebook Page, feel free to ask us.  We would love to assist!