A Facebook Fanpage Is Not The Small Business Marketing Silver Bullet It’s Made Out To Be
Don't get me wrong. A Facebook fanpage is incredibly useful and powerful if it's understood and used properly.
There has been a lot of hype concerning Facebook, fanpages, and timeline lately that begs to be clarified and put into proper perspective. There are too many people selling services based on Facebook as the new frontier and the ever growing and massive number of people there. The problem is a Facebook presence alone is no more useful than a static website is now or just a phone book ad was ten or even twenty years ago. You'll never get the traffic or customers you want from just having a Facebook page and I'll tell you why.
First things first. Just being on Facebook doesn't mean a thing. So many “social media consultants” try to sell it as the fix for your marketing woes but go about it all wrong. It's as if just getting on Facebook will magically make your business grow. They'll tell you about how each like has a value that translates to roughly $1 per like.
“Likes alone are worthless”
The $1 per like figure is BS and I'll pull back the curtain for a moment to let you see why. First, I wouldn’t have to do much more than just say that because your (or a fellow business owner in your network) experience has been just that. Likes alone are worthless.
But I’ll go a step further. If someone likes your page and does nothing more than that, how much revenue does that net you? Exactly. You could go into deep calculations of the time you spend, the likes you have, the “goodwill” and name recognition (does have value), and the revenue… But I’ll give you a simpler method in the premium section below.
Being personal is a bad idea
In fact, if you're using a personal profile for business it could be shut down for violating Facebook's terms. I've seen quite a few businesses do this and some even did it at the advice of someone purporting to be a social media consultant.
That just goes to show there are all kinds out there and who you take advice from can have lasting effects on your marketing efforts. You'll see for yourself there is a clear difference between those who know what they're doing and those who don't.
How do you know if your business' Facebook page is a personal or business page? The simple and definitive way is to look at your page. Do you have friends? If people are listed on your page as friends instead of likes, your page is personal and must be changed lest you incur the wrath of some nameless and unaccountable Facebook intern.
In reality your page should be changed for no other reason than to take full advantage of the marketing power that the Facebook platform has to offer. The fanpage has some definite advantages over a personal profile if you know how to use it.
Not “traditional” marketing friendly
Newsflash! Even though Facebook has such powerful marketing capabilities, people on Facebook resist traditional marketing attempts. That's one of the features about Facebook that attracted them, the unobtrusiveness of the advertising. It's like it wasn't even there… Unless it appealed to that person. And Facebook got better at targeting to get better results.
If you look closer at what I said, you'll realize that is more a reason for, and why businesses should use Facebook.
Have you ever seen the dialog that came up on Facebook advertising to close the ad? One of the options was “relevance” to your interests. That is huge in terms of targeting segments because a person may fit a demographic or have interests that would trigger the ad. But the human component of being able to actively self-select your advertising put Facebook's platform above the rest in my opinion.
Change- it happens suddenly and without recourse. But the reality is change is constant and everywhere. You adapt or die. This is no different so that is not too big of a problem. Don't buy into the hype. Just understand with no illusions, it is someone else's platform and you have zero control. Take appropriate precautions and limit your exposure accordingly.
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premium content tags: facebook, social media, calculating return, ROI, marketing system
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Quick tip:
When starting a fanpage-
We're new on Facebook (when the campaign has had an effect and at least 100 likes have been achieved, strike through or delete new and put now)
Calculating return
KISS
Keep It Stupidly Simple! Create an entry point into your funnel that tags the person as originating from Facebook (or other social media). You may even want to set up a funnel strictly for social media or segment it further to facebook, youtube, linkedin, etc.
That way you have full data integrity when you measure your results. The key point is having a way to measure those results. You don’t need to go so far as calculating value per like unless you really want to. Once you have people tagged and in your funnel, you can see what they are doing. You can track their purchases.
The simplest and most tangible way to calculate your return on social media is to get your total revenue from social media, subtract your total social media costs, and then divide that by the number of people you have on social media. If you segment your social media costs and revenues (as in costs/revenues for facebook, for twitter, for youtube, etc.), you can see which channel is giving you the best return, which one you need to improve, and which one you need to drop.
What's that?
The social media guru didn't say anything about a “funnel?!” How are you supposed to capture these leads from social media and convert them to customers? It takes a well planned system to successfully market online.
You have a site that your message originates from, social media channels that amplify and repeat your message to the masses, and funnels put in place to capture the leads.
If you haven't figured out by now, that is what I do. I build powerful online marketing systems for business. You can hire me to assess your needs and build your online marketing system by being direct and telling me about your business How Can I Help Your Business.
Better yet, you can experience the process I use in my own business first hand and get a feel for what I can do for you by seeing how I get you more customers.
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Rob Calhoun
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