Whenever organizations think of joining the bandwagon of Facebook marketing, the first thing they come up with is "we want to create a Facebook page and have lots of fans for that page".
But, the more crucial points are how to attract fans to the page or how to engage them and how to measure the success or failure of the page.
Let us touch base on both these points in this post.
Attracting fans to the page:
Following are some of the ways to attract more users to your fan page:
1. Make the page attractive and informative: Create an appealing page with good display picture, complete and authentic information about your business, product and services. Include photos, videos and events on the page. Provide something which is exclusive for Facebook users (such as free trial of your product or a free consultation). A well completed page attracts more users because that allows the users to make a more informed decision about 'liking' your page.
2. Cross promotion: Promote the fan page extensively wherever possible – on your website, Twitter, YouTube account, LinkedIn, email signatures, company newsletters etc. With such cross promotion, more and more people will know about the page and there are more chances that people will 'Like' it.
3. Campaigns: Promotion of the page through emails or mobile campaigns. You can always club these campaigns with some contests or promotions on your page to get better results.
4. Facebook Ads: Facebook ads give you very good results for attracting fans to your page. Make sure that you monitor the ads very closely and tweak them often based on the kind of results you get. Include nice pictures in your ad and provide compelling reason to people for liking your page.
5. Contests and Promotions: Contests, sweepstakes and promotions (with some good prizes) help you go viral in terms of your Facebook marketing efforts. Make the contests easy to participate, give nice prizes and give users reasons to spread the word about the contest on your page.
Of course all these ways can fail if you do not have good content on your page to engage the users.
Only promotion about your product or services is a strict NO. Share interesting content, news and educate the audience – in short, offer value. Facebook can act as a very strong platform for you to establish yourself as an expert in your area of business. You can also ask questions and get valuable feedback from the users – they will offer very honest opinion.
Measuring Engagement of Fans on Facebook Page:
It is very important to keep the fans engaged with the page. The engagement can be measured very effectively through the 'Insights' provided by Facebook.
1. Fan base growth or decline: Facebook shows you how the fan base of your page is shaping up – check out if and how it is increasing by tracking the 'New Likes'. You can track these weekly or monthly, depending on your needs and goals. Try and co-relate these with other campaigns which you are running.
2. Active fan base: Only numbers don't matter much. You need an engaged and active fan base. You can see how active the fan base is by checking out the kind of interactions you had for each of your post. The 'Interactions' report shows the engagement of your fans (in terms of commenting, liking or sharing) vis-à-vis the number of times each of your post was displayed on the wall of the fans. This is a very valuable insight to check how engaged the fans are with the page and how much value they are finding in the content which you have shared.
3. Likes and Comments: Keep track of the 'Likes' and 'Comments' happening for the wall posts. Monitor the kind of posts for which you receive more interaction. This can help you decide your strategy about the kind of posts you would like to have.
Apart from 'Insights', there are also tools various tools, which allow you to check the grade, engagement and value of your page. But remember that the objectives of your page and your strategy define the matrices of success/ failure of your page and those are way beyond the numbers or grades. These can act just as pointers for you but not the concluding points. So needless to add, measure the results vis-à-vis your goals.
This article first appeared on Technorati at: http://technorati.com/business/advertising/article/making-your-facebook-fan-page-a/
