The Facebook Formula

Operating a home based business is hard. If it was easy everyone would be doing it. It's hard because no one will knock on your door and give you business, you have to make it happen. Unless you're going to knock on everyone's door showcasing your product line (bad idea!) you have to find new ways in the digital world to get traffic. The best place, by a distance, is Facebook.

Have you got started?

Do you have a public page for your business? If not then this should be on your to do list, today! Create a page of your business or brand; your business name should be easy to spell, don't include .com or Company at the end. Keep it short. Once you have 25 Likes you can set a custom URL to your page (www.facebook.com/your-business-name)

If you have a personal page then you want to be the Administrator of your business page. With this option you can invite all your personal friends to Like your business page to show support. The more the better. Before you invite friends and acquaintances you need to decide what type of content you want to upload. Think of your page as your shop window. Do you want people to stop and look in because they saw something they liked? Of course you do, that's the purpose of a window. That's also the purpose of a Facebook page. Grabbing attention with engaging content. It could be your best selling products, your skill in design, funny, likable pictures or catchphrases, but always keep your personal and business affairs separate. My advice; upload pictures of all the work you have done for your customers. Choose the best looking work that has a higher possibility of engagement. The quality of your photos are important. You don't need to have an expensive camera or flash to take a clear, attractive picture of your work. The best pictures I have seen have been taken using natural sunlight, you'd be surprised how much better a photo looks set outside with flowers in the background compared to a solid black or grey backdrop using artificial light. If you are going to use a backdrop, look for solid white with no shadows.

Tag.

Are you more likely to buy something if your friend bought it? I would. With a simple click you can advertise to all your customers friends what you just made for them. Tagging will make all the difference to whether your Facebook page will substantially help increase revenue.
Firstly, ask if your customer is on Facebook? If so, become friends with them from your personal page. It's good to stay in contact with someone who could be a customer for life. But this also gives you the option to tag your new friends name in the photo. By doing this you advertise your product on their wall, encourage engagement and you will start to notice strangers (friends of your friend) compliment your work. If a stranger makes a comment, this might show up on their status increasing your audience even further. And so on…

 

Tagging your buyers name can be tricky. If their name does not show up in the drop down link it doesn't mean they don't have an account. You'll need to find them a different way by tagging the picture from your personal page. Let me explain; when you have a personal page and you have a business page, it is essentially two users. When tagging you may have to switch from using your business page to using it as yourself. In the top right hand corner (the wheel) you have an option to switch users. In the first picture above I am using my personal page to tag Julie White from Blackpool (my sister). I easily did this by searching for my business page as myself (I did not change users) and now I have a lot more options. On the right you will see that I am unable to tag Julie's link if I am logged in as the business page user.
Confusing I know, but you will get the hang of it. This is the difference between gaining a strong and loyal fan base and having a flat, idle page with 9 fans.

Be wary on how many posts you make. If you post too much too soon, you could clog up someone's news feed. Then, your fans may turn off your notifications and they'll never see your posts again. You won't know how many of your fans have turned off your updates so make sure you don't irritate them only by posting once a day, four to five times a week. My advice; Post in the afternoon, around 1pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays & Sundays; The schedule is not too important but those days are a good mix. There is no danger in taking a brief hiatus but try to post at least once a week to keep yours fans engaged. Don't share other business page posts. Sharing is for personal use, not for your business. If a manufacturer posts a quality picture of a product you sell, save the picture and post it on your own page. That way, if one of your fans wants to share the picture they are advertising your page, not someone elses. Facebook offers a lot of help on these issues. And there are many social media businesses that specialize in this kind of thing. But I think you can manage it on your own without paying someone a lot of money to do. See this link for tips on customer interaction and engagement; http://on.fb.me/XzTnCx

Lastly, make a comment on each picture. In this picture I put "How Sweet… if you would like a ladybug for your little one please contact us for more details." Nothing pushy or pretentious. I don't advertise a call to action on every photo, but you are running a business page and you want people to like the photo and ask you questions if they are interested in purchasing. You will see the first comment on this page asks "How much are these?" I've no idea who this person is and she wouldn’t have known our brand if it were not for Facebook. After responding to this question I will follow up with her a week later to see if she is still interested. Sometimes people just need a reminder.

Marketing

Ever seen those ads on the side of the page. Have you ever clicked on them and if so, why? Was it the picture, the text or the topic? The beauty of Facebook Adverts is your can target selected groups down to their interests and living status. This is why advertising on Facebook is far better than Google Adwords (in my opinion).   

Proven strategy. In November 2012 I helped out a successful vendor of ours with a promotion on Facebook Adwords. You may have seen this type of promotion before and it works for almost anything, but for small business boutiques like yourself this is tremendous and the cost is a fraction of what advertising used to be. It's called Share To Win. The results were fantastic! Spending $60 in Adwords brought in eight new orders and 200 new Likes to her page. Here's a promotion we did recently.

 

Before you create an advert you need to create your post. You need your image to stand out because it will only be 1" big on the Adwords. I am willing to help design you your own flyer with the appropriate content. See above a custom flyer I made for Lauren Turley @ Celebrate! With Thread using her own work. . I advertised her flyer on my page and she did the same on her page. The competition is a chance to win a personalized Cubby and you can enter for free simply by sharing the post. The reason you want your fans to share your page is because they are advertising your business by doing so. Each share can reach hundreds of new people who learn about your company and what you sell. There is no barrier for you to overcome when you are offering a no strings attached free draw, just share to enter. You'll see instant interaction and the number of new likes you get will go up by the hour. All you are doing is giving up the costs of one Cubby & optional advertising costs. There are no downsides to this style of promotion. 
Upload your flyer and click on the star icon to Highlight the post which expands it to the whole screen.

The one condition you have to enter the draw is that everyone enters publicly. If they enter privately (only me) they do not advertise your page to their friends and their name does not show up on the Shared List. At the close of the draw you will copy all the names that shared the post. Quite possibly, only 50% of the names will appear compared to the number that actually shared. There's nothing you can do about that, you don't know the names you can't see.

Facebook have guidelines on what they will allow as a paid ad, and they are not very specific. You may fall foul of their 20% text to image ratio, so keep words on your image to a minimum. There is also a ban on call to action post and visible prices. Very odd, but if you keep the post simple it should clear the high bar.

It does not have to be a "Share to Win" advert. You could say, "all new fans that like our page will be entered..." but that disqualifies your current crop of fans. Another idea who be to say, "Anyone who wants to win a Cubby tell me in the comments" so all fans that comments "I want one" will be entered. Easier to manage and you can go viral with it because your fans comments will show up on their news feed.

Once the draw ends you will need to collect all the names from the list and number them. This can be painstaking. I have yet to find an easy way to do this so if you find one please advise. I give each entrant a number and draw a random number from www.random.org
Announce the winner and congrats!

Create an Advert

I am advertising my page and promoting one of my posts. By default it will choose your latest post, which should be the Share To Win competition. Do not add any more posts or comments on your page as you want your free competition to stay on top for all new visitors.

Advertise in your own country only. You can limit it by choosing you local region but that may only reach a few thousand. I chose Location US, Gender Female (women are more active and engaged on Facebook) ages 21 & up and because you are promoting a children's gift, on family status click "Expecting Parents" "Parents 0-3 & 4-13" I also selected Baby Boomers for a possible grandchild gift. This has the possibility to reach 20 million people. Of course, it's never going to reach anywhere near that amount, but 1% is still 200,000 possible customers.

All that is left now is deciding how much you spend. This is entirely up to you but the more you spend the more your advert will stay live. If your competition is open for three days, I would suggest budgeting for at least $15 a day. Considering the costs advertising in the past, this is a minuscule budget, but the results will be well worth it! 

Your ad would appear like this:

Promoting one of your posts to your fans and friends of fans is an easy less complicated way to getting attention. You will pay to show up on your fans friends timeline. If you have over 500 fans already, this is a good way to reach a larger audience. Choose of of your favorite posts and ask people to show support to your page. 

$50 in Free Advertising. Facebook have offers regarding free credits and you should take advantage when they do. Do an internet search to find other tips on accessing the promo, buy my tip, if you have never advertised before, simply click on Create an Advert and browse around the options. You don't need to select anything at all. I think Facebook flag all accounts that show interest in advertising. Hopefully, you will get an email that offers you a free $50 in advertising credit along with a promo code. You may need to reach 50 Likes to achieve this, so again get your friends, family and customers to like you in order to get that credit.

Website

How is your website? Do you have plans to spend thousands of dollars on a brand new "contemporary" look. Please, let me stop you right there! This might have been the thinking ten years ago, but websites are useless if no one knows how to find it. If you are selling unique boutique gifts like the Cubbies, you're just not going to get sales coming in from your website. It rarely happens. The best source of sales come from someone who saw a personalized gift you made for a friend and you gained a referral from it. The next best is one of your fans seeing a new post of a product or design they haven't seen before, and then you have new reorders some satisfied customers.

Our most successful vendors get all the right comments on their post 

"How much is this…" 
"This is so cute, my son would love…" 
"Can I get it in Blue…" 
"How do I order?" 

With a website there's no interaction. No positive comments to see and no mutual friend connection. My advice; have the URL of your business page your new website link. Or redirect your current website to your business page. Why not, it shows everything your website does and more. You can show the contact details in the About section and you can create a folder with all your product lines. There are plenty of online companies that can install a shopping cart on your business page. Take a look at Soldsie (www.soldsie.com) their free application can take orders through the comments section on your posts which will make life really easier. Try other internet searches for "Facebook business page apps" Most are free so take advantage. You may have to pay a small set up fee but don't pay over the odds, if someone wants a product that they saw from your business page they can simply send you a message asking to buy. A shopping cart is just a way to make things easier. 

I hope you learned a lot from this blog post. People who already knew this probably have an very active page that generate a great stream of business from it. They have a great head start on you but at one point they started with 0 fans. It may have taken two or three years to work up to 10,000 but the costs associated with building and maintaining a business page is zero, you only have to put in the labor to keep the content updated, so be patient. Stick to what you're good at, don't try and compete with the big guys; you can’t and you don't need to. There's no 'get rich quick' schemes out there. To become financial self dependent takes a lot of hard work and not a lot of pay in the beginning. I worked building Cubbies up for two years without paying myself a cent. I kept telling myself, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. 

Lee

Cubbies