Social Media Marketing: Using Facebook to Build Your Client Base

This advice is intended to follow on from my previous blog post ‘BEAKING DOWN SOCIAL MEDIA: Part One’ regarding the basics of social media marketing and why it is important for your business, available here: http://bit.ly/1EsIBVT

For many, the social media site ‘Facebook’ is daily addiction. In Europe alone, there are 223 million users, and 890 million of those log in to Facebook at least one a day, which is an 18% increase from 2014 (Noyes, 2015). Facebook is a way of communicating with friends, following trends, and keeping updated on the big stories in the media, but it’s also rapidly becoming one of the most popular tools for businesses to build the client base and publicity. With 31 million followers to date, and five hundred new profiles created globally every minute, Facebook is the biggest social media hot-spot for businesses to revolutionise their digital marketing campaign (IACP Statistics, 2015).

But how can you get your business involved? And what are the costs and benefits? Whether you’re just starting your digital marketing campaign, or looking to revitalise your existing one, you can use Facebook to accesses thousands of potential customers, keep followers updated on your latest new products and promotions, and use your Facebook Business Page as an interface to interact with customers, gain feedback, and ultimately, promote your business (Sterling, 2015). Even if you’re already doing this on you main website, using Facebook gives you access to a much wider ‘potential client base’ because your page will spread throughout the millions of users, including people above and beyond your target market, rather than just those who access your main website (Chaffey, 2013). And the best part, setting up your Facebook Business Page is absolutely free! What have you got to lose?

Here’s my quick-start guide to creating your own Facebook digital marketing campaign in Four easy steps:

1. Step One: Set up a page for your business – After creating an account – and this can be a personal account – or using an existing one, you can create your business page here: http://on.fb.me/1DT4J9E.

The process is fairly simple, but if you need a little extra guidance, check out my video below: N.B. In the fourth stage – Preferred Page Audience – I only added ‘United Kingdom’ because I created a page for my Blog, which can be accessed anywhere, but if your business has a shop-base, then you should add the address there!

TOP TIP –  Once you’ve set up your Business Page, Facebook will ask you to ‘Like’ your page, and invite your connections to do the same. While the ‘Like’ is a vital tool that will assist the success and publicity of your business page (Sigworth, 2013), you should hold fire on this for now! You may have the framework for your Business Page, you don’t currently have any content, and you want to entice more and more customers to view the page, so it’s better to do this after Step Two below.

2. Step Two: Personalise your page – You want your page to reflect the essence of your business, what it is you do and why others should get involved. According to Jamal and Coughlan, 2012, personalisation of your social media page is key to increasing customer engagement. The easiest way to get started is to update you cover photo. You can download Facebook cover photo’s from several websites, but I would recommend CoverFanatic as its offers a range of smart and professional covers, already formatted to the correct dimensions, and available to download for free at: http://bit.ly/1JnNDmQ. For guidance on how to change your cover photo, as well as editing you company information, and creating a call to action button, check out my video tutorial below.

Once you’ve personalised your Business Page, you can start populating your page with content by posting information about promotions and new products. You can also upload photos and videos of the products you sell. Once you’ve added a few posts, you can start inviting people to like your page, and kick-start your Facebook digital marketing campaign!

For more guidance on how to create a successful business page on Facebook, check out this useful article by Ginny Sosky: http://bit.ly/1ckFBsr;

Top Tip: Whenever you post about a new product, discount, event ect, make sure you always include the correct, and fully operational, link back to your website! For example, if your post offers ‘20% off Bench Sunglasses’ ensure that the link you provide will take the viewer to the page of your website that displays Bench sunglasses that have 20% off. If the link is incorrect, or doesn’t work, your followers will very quickly loose interest (Anneh, 2015). Also, if your link is too long, you can always shorten it with a tool like Bitly (https://bitly.com/).

3. Step Three: Measuring the Response to Your Business Page – Once you have completed the top two stages, you’ll want to check that your Business Page is having the desired effect by measuring the growth of your responses. It is essential to do this as digital marketing strategies should be unique, and what works for one business may fail for another – so you should monitor the success of your campaign even in these early stages, and use that data to tailor and personalise you own campaign (Flores, 2013). Facebook allows you to measure responses directly from your page, so there’s no need to invest in a costly, and often inefficient, programme to do it for you:

On the right-hand side of your business page, you will see a menu that tracks the number of Likes, and number of clicks on your call to action buttons, per week. You should regularly record these numbers because you are looking for a pattern increase as you digital marketing campaign progresses!

You can also access a visual line-graph of this data by clicking on the overhead links, for example, clicking ‘Like’ will display a similar graph to the one below, taken from the John Lewis Facebook page (http://on.fb.me/1FiOWoB):

TOP TIP: Don’t panic if the numbers do not grow immediately! Using Facebook as part of a digital marketing campaign relies on a chain-reaction spreading across the social media network, which may take several weeks to access. Each time a member ‘Likes’ your page, that actions will appear in their newsfeed, where their friends and followers will see it. This, in turn, will trigger more people to like you page, then more people will see it, and so on. The more news feeds you page appears in, the more publicity your page will gain, but this will take time before you start hitting the big numbers! Be patient and ye shall prosper!

In the mean time, for more tips on how to increase Facebook Likes, check out this article by Loomer, 2013, on the secret to the success of Facebook Likes: http://bit.ly/1bkHCuy

That said, do bear in mind that being unique is the key to success! As I mentioned earlier, no digital marketing strategy should be identical, so getting your customers to Like your page is just as dependant on you posting content that is relevant and interesting to them. While getting this wrong initially can be rectified, continuing to get the right balance of content wrong over a long period of time could be detrimental to your campaign – for a better understanding, and tips on how to avoid this, take a look at this article by Rosales, 2013: http://bit.ly/1z1ZRRk

Need any more tips? Facebook have produced their own little guide to aid businesses like yours in their digital marketing campaigns! My guide above provides the basics, but this guide produced by Facebook will give you more advanced tips to assist you once you completed the above three stages. Click here to view Facebook’s business guide: https://www.facebook.com/business/overview).

Thanks for reading! Are you currently using Facebook as a part of your digital marketing campaign? Do you have any of you own tips to share? Please leave your comments below!

Article by Kayleigh McChambell.

Sources:

Anneh, Microsoft Outlook – When Hyperlinks Fail to Work, 2015, Productivity Portfolio, available at: http://bit.ly/1FimCCB;

Chaffey, David,  (2013), Social CRM Strategy Definition, Smart Insights, available at: http://bit.ly/1EEYtXa;

Facebook, Face book Basics: Guide for businesses, 2015, Facebook, available at: http://on.fb.me/JjkhwJ

Flores, Laurent, (2013), How to Measure Digital Marketing, First Edition, Palgrave Macmillan, available at: http://bit.ly/1E5xMGq;

Hussain, A, How to Create a Facebook Business Page in 5 Simple Steps, 2014, Hubspot Blogs, available at: http://bit.ly/1gBbswj;

IACP, (2015), Fun Facts, IACP Centre for Social Media, available at: http://bit.ly/1fklY9K;

Jama, Arshad, and Coughlan, Jane, (2012),  Mining Social Network Data for Personalisation and Privacy Concerns: A Case Study of Facebook’s Beacon, Brunel Business School, available at: http://bit.ly/1OrKZTs

John Lewis Facebook Page, Likes, 2015, Facebook, available at: http://on.fb.me/1FiOWoB;

Noyes, D, The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics, 2015, Zephoria Internet Marketing Solutions, available at: http://bit.ly/1lbTJPy;

Sigwoth, Will, (2013), Facebook Likes: How Important Are They To Your Business?, Social Media Today, available at: http://bit.ly/1FO3FFj;

Sterling, Greg, (2015), Messenger Business: Facebook Turns in to Customer Service and Commerce Channel, Marketing Land Insights, available at: http://mklnd.com/1CZrc8s;