This is a topic which impacts almost every business at some time or another. Maybe you are starting a new venture, or perhaps your existing business simply never got around to opening social media accounts.

There is nothing more daunting that starting from zero. Zero is a scary place! Here are some tips to get you started with Facebook.

Quality Not Quantity

The first thing to keep in mind. Never was a truer word spoken than ‘quality not quantity’. There are multiple reasons why you absolutely don’t want a Facebook following made up of mainly friends and family.

Your friends and family are not customers, so there is zero chance of generating any sales from them seeing your posts. When you publish something on Facebook, only a small percentage of your followers will see it. This percentage is determined by Facebook’s complex algorithms, and is driven by their revenue generation model. If Facebook displayed your posts to ALL your followers, they would be cutting off their major revenue stream.

So keeping this in mind, imagine you publish a post on your Facebook page, and you have 100 followers. 800 of them are friends and family, and 200 are real genuine customers (or potential customers).

Lets presume Facebook decides to show your post to 30% of your followers…. Hopefully by now you can see the problem…. more than likely you are going to be hitting mostly friends and family, and just a smattering of potential clients. If you hadn’t bothered asking the friends and family to like your page, you would have a far better quality audience, and more potential clients seeing your posts. Yes….. less is more.

Of course this doesn’t mean you should actively discourage friends and family, but don’t build an audience dominated by them.

Tagging

This works particularly well if you are a business-to-business service. When you write content, try to tag businesses in a relevant way. Those business owners may in turn LIKE you, and most crucially (if they do) you will gain exposure to their customers.

If you are providing a service to consumers you might want to tag companies who your customers also like, but not competitors. For example, if you are selling dog leads, and your target market is ‘dog owners’, you may have a relationship with another company who sell ‘dog food’….. Tagging them into some of your posts will increase your exposure to like-minded customers.

Invite

You can invite people to like your page. Best of all you can use your existing database of customer emails to do so. Perhaps you have a database of customers who have previously purchased from you?

From the ellipsis (…) button on your page, click INVITE EMAIL CONTACTS

Facebook will give you a number of automated methods to get your email contacts into Facebook.

Promote Your Page On Your Website

Facebook provide a tool ‘The Facebook Page Plugin’, which was formerly called the ‘Facebook Likebox’.

Facebook’s tool allows you to enter a few details about your page, and then provides you with some code to paste onto your website. This code will make a widget appear, a preview of which you get along the way.

In Summary

In short, aim for targeted likes, not every Tom, Dick and Harry. Build an audience which you know you will be able to write engaging content for, which they will like, and share.

Sadly, in reality it is unlikely you will be able to build a 100% organic audience and marketing strategy around Facebook. You will need to consider some form of paid content in tandem to organic. However, by building a real quality audience on Facebook, you will be safe in the knowledge that when you publish content, or even pay to boost content, the right people will be seeing it.