Let’s go back to the basics for a minute.
If you’re going to be successful in marketing your business on Facebook, then it’s critical to have a strong presence on your Facebook fan page. Your fan page will act as a hub for your business and will provide a convenient way for people to reach you, to ask questions, to learn more about your brand or just decide to follow your updates.
But what makes a winning Facebook page? How do you ensure that you will be making the right impression and building a big following? Let’s take a look at some tips that will help…
1. Your Brand Matters
What is absolutely key when creating a great Facebook page or any kind of marketing material, is that you have a strong brand. This should be used to tie your Facebook page, your website and any other elements of your business together in order to create coherence and consistency across your messaging and to help give your campaign a more professional look and feel.
The key to this is consistency. That means that every social media channel you are on should use the same imagery with the same logo and same name and this should also be present on your main website. This ensures that your audience will always know that they’re on the right page and will help to reinforce your brand and improve your visibility and awareness. Note that your branding doesn’t just mean your logo. It also means having the color scheme for instance and the right imagery for your cover image.
Burt’s Bees fan page is a great example of consistent branding when it comes to use of logo, fonts, and color scheme. The branding feels uncomplicated and clean – kind of the feeling you want coming from a brand that sells natural products.
2. Create A Strong and Visible Call to Action
It is now possible to include a call to action button right on your Facebook page. This can be something like a link to your website for example and it’s a great way to ensure that your Facebook page helps you to convert visitors into leads and customers. In the example below, on Gary Vaynerchuk’s fan page, his profile image and fan page timeline image both give you a feel for what he does. His timeline image also has his signature (part of his brand) along with a very simple stamp of his hashtag across other social networks. He also uses the Sign Up button just below his timeline image to encourage website subscriber sign-ups. This helps grow his email list.
4. Description
While your logo and your cover image should somewhat hint at the topic of your site and Facebook page, it will be the description that explicitly lays it out for your audience. This is important as it can help to sell the vision you have for your business and convince more visitors to hit like and become followers.
Again, the key here is coherence and having a single, powerful message throughout all of your marketing materials, your adverts, your logo and your site. This way, you will hopefully strike a chord with your audience and bring more people on board!
5. Your Messaging
The final, and most important, step to building your page to lure in new fans is your messaging. Messaging is everything! It has to do with the voice and tone you are setting to get more fans interested in your brand. Is your brand humorous, serious, sarcastic, empathetic….what qualities encompass what your brand is about? If you can accurately capture this then you need to make sure your posts constantly center around the messaging theme. If you aren’t sure what that should be, consider what you think your customers will respond to. You could start with a short survey to your audience or survey friends and family who would truly buy your product or service. Just remember, messaging comes from your vision as the business owner. You really want to get clear on this before going any further. Once you’re clear, post regularly and make sure you are tapping in to the emotions of your customers. Then keep it comin’!
These are 5 very simple steps to getting started with your Facebook fan page, but there’s a lot more that goes into it. For advanced tips and training, check out this course. And if you’ve never creating a fan page before and this is your first time setting one up, check out this quick tutorial for tips.
