I’ve been doing a lot of coaching, guiding and talking about legitimate ways to use your Facebook page to get more fans for your business. It’s really about building community and the ideas shared here are not unique to Facebook sharing, but are really excellent ways to use that platform. So often, businesses start going down the road of promotions and contests that, if done incorrectly, violate the Facebook terms of service. I assert that these promotions may not be what you need, (even if you are doing them the right way.) Rather, focus on what you CAN do to build community without resorting to bribery, freebies, conditions and begging.
Seven ideas:
- Be a resource for your community. What’s the latest news? What are you reading that your community would find of interest. Share the link in status updates.
- Take a poll — make it fun, and ask community members to share the poll with their friends (you can use the Polls or Questions applications to do this.)
- Feature a fan of the (day? week? month?) — what ever time frame works best for the resources at hand.
- Tag businesses you’ve “liked” in status updates (use Facebook as the page, then “like” other business pages; use the @ symbol to tag those pages in your updates.)
- Are there businesses geographically close to yours? Can you be a good neighbor by sharing their specials, their news or events?
- Ask closed-ended questions — people don’t want to work that hard to answer you, so give them a choice of two or more options to answer.
- Do share links to your best content (blog posts, videos, photos, etc. ) but share links to others’ content as well, at least a third of the time. It’s called SOCIAL media.
What other organic ways can you use your Facebook page to increase fans of your business?