Use facebook to promote your business
How to use Facebook for business
Facebook is right in the middle of the new business revolution, enabling businesses both small and large to reach vast audiences easily. However there is already a backlash happening against people using social media to ‘sell’ to their friends or followers. What usually ahppens is that someone joins a group, drops a link to their website(which no one ever clicks on) and then leaves the group never to return.
It has been said that the average customer needs to have contact with a product or service approximately 7 times before they will seriously consider buying it. It is important that a person feels they can trust a product or vendor before they buy it, and that trust can be formed by repetitive contact and can take some time to build – this is where the traditional wisdom of ‘7 contacts’ comes from. For some people, this may be a leap of faith from “link dropping” but coaching and training can help…
The good thing about Facebook and other social networking sites is that those ‘7 contacts’ can happen in a short space of time and if somebody accepts your friend request you already have head start over a ‘stranger’ selling the same product.
But as soon as you pitch to people straight away you will throw away any trust you have built with them!
So if you are planning to use Facebook for business make sure your emphasis is on networking, go into it with an open mind and be prepared also to prove yourself or your product to people the same way as you would have to with any other kind of promotional activity.
To show your business in its best light you need to make sure your ‘profile’ is suitable for business purposes, having a load of friends posting raunchy comments or pictures of you is not going to help your professional image!
Facebook is great for sharing with friends and family so you may want to get around this by setting up a separate profile for business, Rumours are that this is not allowed but evidence supporting this is thin on the ground. Of course use a separate email account and of course have a separate password too.
Your profile picture should also be professional, but still friendly – no snapshots of you with beer being poured over you! You should definitely use a professional to shoot some for you – and try to change around from time to time.
However do make sure that your business profile is not completely devoid of all personality, facebook is about building relationships with people first and foremost, and any good salesperson knows that people buy from other people. And their preference will always be to buy from people they know and trust.
Consider what goes on there – Are you happy with a potential client seeing those photographs? If it’s not don’t put it on there – and if something appears on your wall that you are not 100% happy with – get rid of it! (You can easily do this by clicking ‘remove’ on the top right side of each post).