Facebook marketing mistakes
Have you finally caved in to peer pressure and started a Facebook page for your business? Relax. If your customers are on Facebook, you made the right decision. Facebook is a great way to create brand awareness, engage with your customers and generate new sales for your business as long as you don’t make these mistakes:
1. Posting infrequently
Some business owners get impatient with Facebook, expecting instant gratification and stop posting after a few weeks. Then, when they start posting again, they wonder why they haven’t acquired new fans. It takes time to build a following. Consistency is the key. Post several times a week. Depending on your industry, you may want to concentrate your efforts at the end of the week, rather than the beginning.
2. Posting too much
Don’t go to the other extreme with your posts. I’ve seen some pages that send out 5 posts right in a row. That’s just too much, and borders on spam. If you’re just starting out, post once or twice a day, at the most. As you build a following, you can post a little more frequently, especially if there’s some great news that you just can’t wait to share until the next day.
3. Selling, instead of telling
There’s nothing worse than a Facebook page that only talks about the great deals they have on their products or services. If you want to sell all the time, take out a Facebook ad! Instead, share helpful tips about your product or service. Post pictures and videos. The aim here is engagement not broadcasting.
4. Not having an end goal in mind
Before you start posting anything on your page, you should figure out what you want the page to do for your business. Do you want to use it to drive traffic to your website? Do you want to use the page for brand awareness? Maybe you want the page to be a vehicle where your customers can share stories about how they use your product. Determining your goal will help you determine what you post.
5. Boring your audience
Don’t just post status update after status update or photo after photo. Mix up the content. Throw in a comment that’s off topic. Be personal once in a while. I recommend the 80/20 rule. 80% of the time, your content should be business-related, 20% of the time, your content can be personal.
6. Failure to take advantage of Facebook tools & apps
Have you created a custom welcome tab for your page? There are some excellent FB tools available to help you do this. Does your profile picture/logo display correctly in your thumbnail? If not, make sure you edit the picture to fix it.
7. Violating Facebook’s terms of service
There’s no quicker way to get your page banned from Facebook, than to violate their rules.
What are the most common violations?
• Using your personal profile for business, rather than using a proper Facebook page.
• Failing to follow Facebook’s rules about running contests.
• And “tagging” people in an image without their permission. “Tagging people to get their attention is not only a violation of Terms but can be reported by those you are tagging as abusive behaviour on your part — which brings your violation to Facebook’s attention and opens your Page’s content to review,”
The best way to avoid these common mistakes is to take the time to learn the Facebook platform, educate yourself on how to build and sustain an audience, and remembering to engage with people, just like you do in real life.
Facebook marketing problem:
8. New Facebook settings are limiting what your fans see in their news feed
Have you noticed that you are only seeing updates in your newsfeed from the same people lately? Have you also noticed that when you post things like status messages, photos and links, the same circle of people are commenting and everyone else seems to be ignoring you?
Don't worry, everyone still loves you and nobody has intentionally blocked you. The problem is that a large chunk of your friend/fan list can't see anything you post because the "New Facebook" has a newsfeed setting that, by default, is automatically set to ONLY SHOW POSTS FROM PEOPLE WHO YOU'VE RECENTLY INTERACTED WITH OR INTERACTED WITH THE MOST (which would be limited to the couple of weeks just before people started switching to the new profile).
So in other words, for both business and personal pages, unless your friends/fans commented on one of your posts within those few weeks or vice versa - you are now invisible to them and they are invisible to you!
Here’s the fix:
Scroll down to the bottom of the Newsfeed on your HOME page and click on "Edit Options". In the popup, click on the dropdown menu next to 'Show posts from:' and select "All Of Your Friends and Pages" and then click Save.
Simply posting an update about it won't do any good because lots of your friends/fans already can't see your posts by default. You'll either have to send out a message to everyone on your list (which I'm not even sure business pages can do and is a rather tedious method) or post an event explaining the situation like this one and invite your entire fan base and/or friend list. You can also tweet about it hoping that most of your fellow Facebookers are also on twitter.
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO SHARE THIS WITH AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN SO WE CAN TRY AND GET EVERYONE INFORMED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. Anyone who isn't seeing your posts right now will never see them until they have changed their settings as explained above.
9. Funnel your fans onto your email subscriber list.
Have you developed a system to funnel Facebook fans into your website and onto a page that has an ‘optin’ form (to subscribe to your regular ‘Hint’s & Tips’ emails [You do have one, don’t you?])? Unless you have email addresses, all the fan traffic in the world, will be useless to you – lookers won’t become buyers until they trust you - personally.
I hope this helps,
Paul Johnson
Missing Piece Marketing
p.s. I guess I should introduce myself (you can never be too sure these days) here's my background and what I do:
http://www.missingpiecemarketing.com.au/about
p.p.s.s. If you enjoyed this report and want to see more, just fill in the boxes below and you’ll receive the FREE report “17 Ways Advertising Companies Can Rip You Off!”.
Please email me click here , I’d love to help.
A little extra for you:
I couldn’t believe it either; here is a link to a YouTube video of to a guy who gets 100% results from FREE advertising http://youtu.be/KPbtLNFpLHM
