Found this on my facebook update today. Thought I would share. Please look up the web page for the original article.
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How to Inject Some Life Into Your Florist Facebook Page Wednesday, August 03, 2011 Facebook can be a great way to promote your floristry business to people near and far but unfortunately I see so many business Facebook pages that are like virtual ghost towns. If you’ve started a page but just don’t seem to be getting a lot of traction, here’s some ideas to help get your Facebook page earning its’ keep.
Facebook is the New InternetThe great business Facebook page rush is in full swing. “Facebook is the new Internet” goes the cry and so we keep busy by setting up a Facebook page for our businesses – but then what? The truth of the matter, just like a traditional website, if you don’t have compelling reasons for why you have a Facebook page and how you intend to use it to meet your business objectives, then you might as well not bother.
Sometimes we just do things because we are reared and geared to simply get busy at all costs. We get taught at school and in our early jobs that the best way to find yourself in the bad-books with our authority figures is to look idle - “Time to lean? Time to clean!” - so we develop a strategy of always keeping on the move, punching out the next item on the never-ending to-do list.
The trouble with this is we can fall into the trap of just doing things because everybody else is doing them. I did it with Twitter, just jumped in and went for it, only to discover that without a clear objective for Twitter and strategies to act on, it was all a bit pointless. So now my Twitter account just kind of languishes out here on the Internet gathering cyberdust. Of course I plan to get back to it…
9 Steps to Facebook MasteryTruth is, you probably do know why you have a Facebook page – to promote your floristry business in order to thrive! So how can you go about making your Facebook page work harder for you?
Here are some ideas 1. Get Clear on Your Objectives If your objective is to leverage Facebook in order to promote your floristry skills in order to increase or maintain healthy sales volumes, then good! If you have another reason – be sure you are clear on what this “reason for bothering” is.
2. Identify The Problem You Help Solve Ask yourself (or your customers) what are the needs you help your prospects (potential customers) and existing customers with? What are the problems you help solve, the desires you help them to fulfill? This doesn’t need to be complicated: a customer’s “problem” might be as simple as “find the right floral design to complement my overall wedding concept”.
3. Identify Your Perfect Customer Who are they? Where do they live? How old/rich/motivated to buy are they? What are their interests? What Facebook pages do they like? You can’t ask and answer enough questions about your perfect customers.
4. Say the Words “I Am a Publisher” Aloud 3 Times Recognise that marketing in the brave new world of social media is about “publishing” not just “advertising”.
5. How Can You Engage The Right People? “Engaging” in this context means “being interesting and relevant enough that your prospects/customers pay attention to what you publish on Facebook”. Simply blasting out sales messages and self-promotional hype won’t cut it – people just tune that stuff out and in fact, actively eliminate it from their world. So what can you publish that will engage not irritate? Not necessarily difficult; it might be as simple as regularly posting photos of your latest creations.
6. How Are You Different? There’s a lot of noise online – how can you stand out from the pack? What makes you a better choice than the competition? Or do you make the competition irrelevant because you are so unique? Is your message clear? Do you effectively communicate how it is that you solve your customer’s problems?
7. Would Advertising Help? Facebook advertising can be a very effective and relatively inexpensive way of attracting the right prospects to your page. How to do it well, however, is a whole ‘nother post.
8. Publish Regularly If you don’t keep publishing to your Facebook page regularly you will fall off people’s radars. Again, be sure you avoid constant sales hype in favour of just plain being interesting. Interesting is a great way to stand out from the pack – for example as I type this I am wearing purple jeans – seriously! How interesting is that?
9. Call To Action Of course at the end of the day all the Facebook “Likes” and friendly online interaction in the world won’t pay the bills, so you need to figure out the best ways to drive sales. This may involve multiple tactics like:
• an e-commerce store within your page for those who are ready to buy,
• hard-to-refuse offers
• or a mailing list sign-up form for more reluctant prospects which in time will hopefully convert them into paying customers.
Of course, the ultimate call to action can be delivered personally, after replying to any questions your Facebook fans may ask - so make sure you have email alerts turned on so you know whenever somebody makes a comment on your page.
There’s probably more to it all than this, but contemplating these fundamentals will help you to really crank up your Facebook page and extract some real value out of it for your business.
Better to do it well than to waste time that could be better spent elsewhere … like on the actual Internet (ha ha).
Written by Seamus - Tesselaar's website manager and marketing nerd.
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