How to Empower Your Brand with a Personalized Facebook Page
The popularity of social media and the associated marketing of social media is moving at breakneck speed. Snooze now and your primary competition will outshine you on the major social network stage. A personalized Facebook page has the power to take brand recognition to the next level – if you do it correctly.
Even if you are a newbie to online marketing, or a freshly-minted entrepreneur who is working hard to blaze a trail and stand out from the crowd, Facebook has the ability to deliver a lot more than merely the opportunity of wowing a huge international audience. In addition, with wireless internet access being so readily available in today’s day and age, updating and managing your personalized business Facebook page is easy from virtually anywhere and at any time!
How Will a Facebook Page Help My Brand?
The world uses Facebook to connect. It does so in the middle of the night and during lunch hour. Prior to the most recent site upgrade, a Facebook page was the odd man out. Its relatively static and unwieldy nature made it more of a liability than an advantage. Now the owner can actually take the site places and allow it to interact with individual users and other sites.
Soshable’s social media marketing gurus urge entrepreneurs and business marketers to capitalize on the Facebook page’s new-found portability. The page can at this instant interact much like a person; as such the “brand” has the opportunity to chat with other Facebook users, leave comments and even offer helpful bits of advice.
As a perk for new entrepreneurs, Facebook’s page setup makes it possible to get a virtually instant reputation boost. Sure, your page might be little older than one week, but if you remember to use it and “like” other business pages with a stellar reputation, some of the respectability rubs off on yours. Would-be clients or potential customers see the company you keep and may be more likely to give your business a closer look.
Getting the name out there and actively pursuing Facebook users raises brand awareness and entices more prospective customers and clients to click on the “like” button. As a result, the entrepreneur gets the brand name out to other users’ networks of online friends on a consistent basis.
The trick here is to capitalize on the impulse click from users’ news feeds; unless the business runs a promotion that actively advises the user to go to a designated Facebook page, this method yields reliable results. (Soshable warns that the number of users who will go to a business’ Facebook page unprompted is a low two percent!)
Of course, empowering your brand with a Facebook page only works if you actually post engaging content on a regular basis. The experts at Social Media Explorer are quick to point out that a boring page – or one with very little activity – is almost worse than not having one at all. If there is nothing going on at your business’ Facebook page, it makes it clear to would-be consumers that there is little interest in the product or service. Remember that the goal here is activity, and only consistent tending to the page and posting plenty of comments, pictures and event notifications can make this happen.
How Do I Personalize My Facebook Page?
All Facebook urges the entrepreneur to think of a business page as a brand profile. Not surprisingly, this explanation resonates well with a business person who might have spent long hours putting together a professional personal profile for a user account. When it comes to the brand, generic terms usually win out.
As a result, the business loses plenty of connective opportunities that a more personal approach and touch could have yielded. After all, if a Facebook user goes through the trouble of checking out a business’ brand page, the would-be customer does not want to find generic information or platitudes.
So let’s assume that the business page is personable and interesting. Next comes the crux of personalization: posting frequency. This is slightly different from merely making it a point to consistently add content to the page, like you might do with a static blog. The Facebook news feed – on which the page’s posts will show up now – is real-time. There is no cache that keeps it in front of users for 15 minutes at a time.
Thus, the once-a-day posting habit in the wee hours of the morning is probably a waste of time. Conversely, the three posts, which the entrepreneur publishes during the high-traffic lunch hour, most likely will have a lot more impact.
Other frequently overlooked user abilities are the creation of custom tabs that call for action, the use of creative photos and – if the budget allows – a creative partnership with other Facebook applications. Frito Lay just entered into an agreement with Zynga, which allows Farmville players to place a Frito Lay truck and sales stand on their farms. In addition, users were redirected to the Frito Lay page to “like” it for more info; genius! Of course, this type of personalization comes with a hefty price tag attached.
For the more cash-strapped entrepreneur, Mashable advises the creation of sticky content, such as would be the case with tutorials or consumer resources. If the product involves technical gadgetry, this type of interactive online manual is a great way of adding value to a business’ Facebook page that other commercial venues may not offer. Work.com takes it a step further and urges the entrepreneur to provide a broad range of useful content. This is a workable solution for any business.
Blog posts that are only tangentially related to the widget you sell or make have the power to draw in those readers whose interests do not directly lie in widgets. Adding a blog – hire a freelance writer if you are not an eloquent writer – allows for a steady stream of sticky content at a moment’s notice.
Examples of Great Facebook Pages
Are you overwhelmed? Last week you were an entrepreneur with a dream, this week you are an online marketer, web designer and copy writer. Take heart! There are plenty of excellent examples out there that offer insights into what works, what stinks and where your personalized Facebook page can kick it up a notch or two. Econsultancy highlights what makes pages pop.
For Abercrombie & Fitch, it was the simplicity of the design with the use of bolded text. The Facebook user did not have to guess what the promotion was all about. Best Buy excelled at making functionality a snap with short category names that customers could click on for more information; the result was an engaging, non-cluttered page that made use easy and convenient.
BMW got the point of wanting to be “liked” across quite nicely; it was impossible to miss the call to action. The Body Shop USA capitalized on seasonal consumer behavior to entice shoppers to take a closer look at the various offerings.
In short, the number of stellar examples cannot be dismissed. As a business owner or marketer, make it a point to peruse successful sites. Measure their success by the number of fans they have and the amount of user-directed interactivity that goes on there. See what works; read what posters say. Consumers are actually rather forthright and will highlight what does not work for them on a Facebook page. From there, go and do likewise.
