There are two main reasons that people just don`t care and those are the context of your fanpage and its content. So how do you fix it? What context can you use to improve ROI and what content will help you achieve your long term goals? This post aims to answer these questions.
There are two main reasons that people just don`t care and those are the context of your fanpage and its content. So how do you fix it? What context can you use to improve ROI and what content will help you achieve your long term goals? This post aims to answer these questions.
Choosing Context that People Care About
Sorry to burst your bubble but nobody cares about you, your brand or your product. What??? When choosing the context, you must put yourselves in the shoes of Bob from Baghdad who is a Baker and not a business owner. What does Bob care about? What interests him and what turns him off straight away?
Let us take for example you sell hangover cure pills called Speedy Hangover Herbal Recovery. You have a lovely set of photography of your bottles and a whole list of benefits that you want to get across to people. You read all about making a fanpage and set to work choosing the settings (which we will go into more detail a little lower in the post). The header image shows off your bottles and the fanpage name is proudly Speedy Hangover Herbal Recovery…..Bob will think the following: “spammy, they will just hard sell to me, there will be no content that actually interest me and it won`t be fun which is why I am here in the first place”. You know how I know this? Because I would!
What should you do? Let`s think about how we can find a context for our product that interests people, it’s quite simple actually! Everybody hates hangovers! So let`s use that and create a fanpage about hating hangovers. The content will be fresh, funny, relevant and interesting to Bob (who infact has a hangover right now and is just chilling on Facebook to avoid thinking too hard). He sees the title of the fanpage on his newsfeed as three of his mates just liked it.
So when you are choosing the context of your brand try and look at it from the users point of view of what they are interested in. If you need to convince people, fanpages will fail every time as people don`t join them to do more reading. They want instant interesting engaging content that is relevant to them.
Images are a Powerful Context Builder
We shall run with the Hangover idea. So we need images and there are two of them. One is for the fanpages avatar essentially, it should be a clear, simple image that can be seen at 50px by 50px as this is what will be seen when the pages content is shown on peoples newsfeed. Next we need the main header and this needs to be something special.
1. It should tell people what you do.
2. Make people smile (yes first impressions last).
3. Want them to click like.
Tell people what you do; put some big text on there or use an image that tells a thousand words. Nothing like a big picture of someone hating life in the morning surrounded by empty bottles of red wine. If you are a charity then put the striking side of what you do. I made the mistake of putting a picture of happy children on our Camillian Care Home banner and we received very little new likes. As soon as I put a heart breaking picture of a disabled child with HIV, the likes increased.
You have to affect people. When choosing and image, you`ll know what you get the right one as it will induce feelings in you and thus your page`s visitors.
Set the Scene with the Right Settings
Choosing the type of page you have is essential. If you are a business then select that the category you are not the one you want to be. The nice thing about select local business is that you can add an address and encourage people to check-in. If you are doing a real fanpage then make sure you (or your content) is famous.
The about section is also key, I advise putting your URL high on the about page settings and add all your various URL’s as people will hunt these down to find out more if they like what you have to say. Web Courses gets a lot of new customers from people who liked our fanpage and then wanted to learn more.
Always give your users a place to go next.
Plan your Content
Do you have a calendar? Course you do, so let`s put down a list of content over say a week. You don`t have to add content every day, in-fact I advise against it, but when you do, it needs to count and regularity is key. People will come to expect new posts. Now the aim here is for your fanpage to be completely filled with your fans content, however as we will discuss soon there are times when you need to use your fanpage as a sales tool. In the calendar plan out what type of content and when you are going to post it e.g. Mondays: news from your sector e.g. “hangovers voted the worst feeling ever – BBC news”, Tuesday: commenting, Wednesday: nothing, Thursday: special offer on product or service and Friday: something funny.
Keep an Eye on Interactions
Remember whatever content you add keep and eye on the notifications of your fanpage and reply to anything that is relevant or can lead to a sale. If someone asks a question try to be the first to answer with a friendly link back to your website to help close that sale.
Here is a good example. Sinor Pico Restaurant added me to their group and I place on their wall that “sorry guys, used to love your restaurant but I have stopped going as you started putting in MSG into your food”. Within an hour or two, the manager had replied to my message with “We are sorry to hear that and we`ll look into it and get back to you”. He did! Within a few hours he added the reply “We have found that a new Chef had been putting in MSG and we have instructed him never to add it again, we would like to thank you for your comment and please send us your address so we can send you a voucher”. Excellent! Now that is the way to do Social Media Marketing.
Keeping a close eye on your pages interactions is key to making it a success. Reply, be professional, funny and positive and you`ll build relationships with your fans giving you more leverage to turn them into sales.
The 10% Rule
Let us first recap.
1. Create a fanpage around context that people will find interesting.
2. Choose images that invoke a feeling and tell people instantly what your page is about.
3. Keep an eye on interactions.
The 10% rule is something I live by and it has helped me avoid spamming our fans and getting a better conversion rate. When doing direct sales, such as adding a link to a product page, then do this only 10% of the time. Why? Because people are bored of being sold to! I am and I am sure you are if you put yourself in the fans shoes.
Let’s take the hangover cure example, of the content if 10% of it is where you come in saying “yeah, last night was a mad one but I took a insert product name here and I feel a lot better! add direct link to sales page.
If you hard sell just 10% of the time then you avoid turning your fans off and potentially turn them into a sale.
Social Media Marketing Courses
There is a lot to marketing on Social Networks and we are very proud of both our private courses and workshops.
Private SMM Training for your Brand
If you have an existing brand you want to take care of and concentrate on then take one of our private 6 hour courses (over 2 lessons). Work with our experts to come up with a plan to include all the relevant social networks to help you get ROI for your Social Media connections.
Group SMM Training
If you like the group training idea and want an overview of how all this Social Media Marketing works then our regular workshops are the place for you. Learn how it all fits together and the exciting options and methods you can use for your product or service to increase sales.
