After utilizing the free internal marketing features Facebook offers to business page owners and creating content that attract fans, your business becomes more transparent. Now customers can ask their questions (or voice their complaints) on a platform where they will be noticed, and as a business owner, you can learn more about the demographics of your following and what types of things actually interest them. But what if your fans aren't as engaged as you’d like?
Facebook Photo Contests
To get people sharing about your business, try hosting a photo contest. With popularity growing, many third party app developers have stepped up to create photo contest apps that integrate with Facebook pages in an almost seamless way.
WooBox’s photo contest app is intuitive and includes reporting data. I've noticed other apps have awesome tutorials on how to setup a custom Facebook app, but once it’s time to measure your return from the photo contest (or sweepstakes) you find out the app never collected any data about social shares, number of new likes entering through the application or how active Facebook users were with voting. WooBox includes all of this reporting in the monthly subscription so that you’re able to report on things like what days your fans were most active, and whether people were engaged in sharing and voting.
Hosting a photo contest may bring in new fans, and create affinity among your current following, but remember, it's always more successful if the grand prize is viewed as high value.
Facebook Offers
Running an offer on Facebook used to be free to business page owners, but in September (2012) Facebook announced to business owners that in order to run an offer one would have to couple them with a paid campaign. But this is not necessarily a bad thing because now business page owners are targeting the reach of their offers better. For example, you most likely won’t see offers in your newsfeed anymore for “local” business that are actually in another state.
View the post below. A friend likes a page. That friend’s “like” displays in my newsfeed. But instead of the like going relatively unnoticed, when a page is also running a “sponsored” campaign that brand becomes front and center (along with a list of all of my other friend who also like that same page).
This could help your business gain new Facebook likes and shares, but it may create a negative impression if the “friends of fans” don’t understand why they’re seeing somewhat obnoxious content appear in their newsfeed.
Facebook Promoted Stories
To avoid this negative impression, you may be more successful at marketing your business on Facebook by participating in a promoted story.
Just write a compelling update and then click on the “promote” hyperlink that appears on the post.
Once you click on “promote” another window appears where you can set your budget and determine audience or payment method. This makes it very easy to promote your content to the friends of people who like your page already. But make sure to keep the content you’re promoting general and appealing to people who may have no idea what your business is about.
Facebook Ads
If you have the budget to launch a broad Facebook Ads paid advertising campaign you can research what content attracts people to your page because you’re not limited to only “friends of current fans”. You can bid on any targeted audience.
Facebook makes it very easy to get started by placing a “create an ad” link in the main navigation menu of your business page. Test out many difference audience types and ad copy. Remember an eye-catching ad graphic is key, but its dimensions can only be 100px by 72px.
Ready to continue learning about how to market your business on Facebook using promotions? Watch OMI's class, A Social Promotions Primer. You will discover:
- The different promotion types
- Key legal considerations when planning a promotion
- Do’s and Don’ts of Facebook Promotional Guidelines
- Contest marketing best practices