The advent of social media has completely changed the way we market our product. As marketers this should be nothing new, we are in a constantly changing field and that is what we signed up for; however, Facebook and Twitter have thrown a wrench in machine.
Now, if you are a bigger brand it can be easy to set up a social media profile and have a couple thousand people “like” the profile and actively engage it, but for a smaller business this process can be excrementally harder. Many businesses try to leverage deals and such but without fans, this approach will not succeed. This is why I like to advocate taking your social media approach off of profile page and on to where customers are already interacting.
Here are three effective ways to do so:
Link to your Page Everywhere
Now while this tends to be scary, as not all customers are always “happy” with what you did for them, the potential benefits tend to outweigh the bad. First, channeling your customers to one location, by linking to your page on your website, email signature, and everywhere possible, to weigh in on your company allows you to control what is being said and take steps to fix and respond to it. This is something that word of mouth and the thousands of other outlets do not give you the option of doing.
Second, this approach also allows you to connect with the customers where they are at. Most active Facebook users spend at least 45 minutes a day on Facebook, if they are a fan of your business that can potentially give you a 45 minute window where the customer can see your status update and remember they needed to purchase something from you.
Create Other Pages
This is something many businesses tend to overlook, but can be an extremely helpful marketing tactic. Say you are a marketer for Pringles, you could create a fan page such as “help this Pringle chip get more fans then Miley Cyrus” (yes this was already done but it wasn’t done by Pringles). This is something that is easy to market as people like to fan interesting pages more then they like to fan the Pringles page itself.
With some simple marketing and link building you could have a page, that you are the admin of, which has thousands of fans that can also be potential customers. These fans can then be leveraged however you desire. The possibilities are endless.
Run Promotions
Let’s face it, people love free. You are always going to have an easier time getting fans if they have something to benefit from doing it. Say you sell a blue widget, you could post a video that says “Become a fan on Facebook and one lucky fan will win a blue widget when we do our drawing next week”.
Additionally, you could leverage potential fans by telling them that if they have friends that are also our fan they will win a blue widget as well (up to five friends). That way when someone becomes a fan of your site they will tell others to be a fan as well so if one wins they all benefit. Obviously you are out the price of the widget but you have to ask yourself isn’t this worth the cost of having committed fans that follow your pages? Carls Jr does this really well by letting their fans spin a wheel then giving them something free (I did this and got a free six dollar burger).
These are merely a few examples of ways you can market your social media pages without doing anything on the page itself. Remember optimization and good posts are important, but really the only thing stopping you from engaging with more fans is your own creative ability.