Marketing your brand on Facebook: how to get it right

Having a presence on the world’s preeminent social network can do wonders for your business, but only if you get your strategy right. Here are some vital tips.

If Facebook were a country consisting of its users, it would be the third-largest largest country in the world behind only India and China – and would be more than twice the size of the United States.

In Australia alone, there are over nine million active users, seven million of whom are 29 or older, which may surprise many people given the perception that Facebook is primarily the domain of teenagers.

Until recently, Facebook has primarily been used by most people as a way to keep in touch with friends and family, however it now offers you a number of ways to grow your business and engage in a direct dialog with your customers whilst their friends ‘watch’ this conversation.

So, as a mortgage broker, how can you use Facebook to grow your business?

Firstly, it’s important to understand that Facebook, similar to LinkedIn, provides for both personal profiles and also business profiles – and the creation of your business’s Facebook page is the key foundation for growing your business using this social medium.

How to create your Facebook page

Your business page will consist on a number of key elements, many of which are similar to your personal profile – such as the wall, info, posts and profile picture – so be sure to complete these in full. Remember your Facebook page can be found by Google, so view it almost like a website.

There are a significant number of applications that you can incorporate into your page which will provide additional functionality – such as competitions, polls and events. However, before launching head-on into these it’s best to master the use of the fundamental elements such as posts.

If you have a Twitter account and Blog, I recommend that you have these set up to automatically feed to and from your Facebook page – as this will multiply your efforts across all key social media platforms. Plus, be sure to add social sharing to your website, which will enable your website visitors to directly interact and post to Facebook.

Facebook fans

To gain visibility of your page, you need to build up a number of fans, who are in many ways similar to friends within your personal account.

A person, or another Facebook page, becomes a Fan by ‘liking’ your page. Fans are similar to followers on Twitter or subscribers to your newsletter. They’re your audience, and are ideally a mix of current and potential clients. A key objective of your Facebook strategy should be to grow the number of fans or likes that your page gains over time.

Ideally, if you have a database of 500 subscribers to your newsletter, then a good goal will be to convert between 30% and 50% of them into fans. Fans are vital to the success of your page for a number of reasons, however the key reason is due to the way in which Facebook newsfeeds operate and have the ability to make your posts go ‘viral’.

If you’re an existing Facebook user you’ll be familiar with the newsfeed – a stream of updates from your friends, comments they’ve made, places they’ve been and, importantly, pages they’ve liked. When you post information on your page this will automatically show in the newsfeeds of all of your fans. Better still, if your fans either like your post or comment on the post then this will then show in the newsfeeds of all of their friends.

Say, for example, you have 100 fans of your page. You post information about a special you’re offering only to your Facebook fans. This post will then show up in the newsfeeds of all your fans. If 50 of your fans like this post, it will become visible in the newsfeeds of their friends. If each of your fans have 100 friends, your post will be seen by up to 5,000 people.

Clearly the objective here is to not only engage with your current fans, but to also encourage their friends to become fans of your page.

IMPORTANT: Once you have 25 fans of your page you can claim your vanity URL, which in essence gives you the ability to create a customised Facebook page address.

Engage your fans

It’s important to provide your fans with interesting and engaging content otherwise they’ll simply ignore your posts in their feeds, unlike you, or worse still become disengaged with you and your business.

Here are a few suggestions for content:

1. Provide a steady stream of updates, don’t post 5 times in the first day then do nothing for another month – post consistently, two to four times a week as a minimum.
2. Provide links to interesting content from third parties – e.g. a news article on preparing to sell your house.
3. Comment on topical issues in the media.
4. Pose questions and seek feedback.
5. Run a competition (be sure to check Facebook’s competition guidelines).

Grow your fan base

In addition to providing good quality content on your page which has the potential to be fed into the newsfeeds of your fans’ friends, there are a number of ways to gain new fans:

1. Include a link in your email signature.
2. Add a link to your business cards.
3. Add a prominent ‘call to action’ on your website, ideally to like your Facebook page and become one of your fans.
4. Place a link to your page on your personal profile.
5. Include a link in your Twitter & LinkedIn profiles.
6. Add a link in all of your marketing materials.
7. Run a Facebook ad campaign.

Summary

Facebook pages are becoming as important today as company websites were a few years ago, and the best part of all is that once you’ve created your page you can keep it fresh and generating new business for you by only spending a few minutes a day. 

Byron Gray is the general manager of Intellitrain, a specialist training company for the finance and mortgage broking industry.