Business Speaker on Facebook for Business
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational keynote speaker whose topics include Facebook for business, social media marketing and Facebook advertising. He’s a leading authority on self-employment and the author of Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed (2011, Wiley). There are four chapters in his award-winning book (2012 Small Business Book Awards) that discuss Facebook in detail (in Part 6 of the book: Leverage Social Media) and is included below for your review. The book has a total of 80 short chapters, each ending with an Implementation Checklist. Also, Patrick’s perspective on Facebook marketing for businesses, including national marketing opportunities as well as local geo-targeted campaigns, is summarized below.
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Keynote Speech about Facebook Advertising
Facebook offers tremendous opportunities to local businesses. It allows you to target people by location as well as their demographic profile. Even better, you can target people who already “like” other Facebook Pages. Taken together, Facebook has one of the best target marketing platforms on the internet. Aside from Facebook advertising, businesses can also learn to engage their fans on Facebook by posting visual (photos or videos) content and providing incentives for interaction. Micro incentives for micro actions! Patrick has accumulated dozens of Facebook success stories involving PPC advertising, micro incentives, effective posts and tagging people in photos. If you’re looking for someone to present an informative and entertaining synopsis of the business opportunities on Facebook, Patrick Schwerdtfeger is the perfect choice!
Chapter 70: Facebook Profiles & Pages
Can you use Facebook for business?
Yes! Absolutely. But we need to begin with some of the basics. There are three different “facilities” you can use on Facebook: profiles, groups, and pages. Profiles are for individuals. You probably already have a profile. Profiles have “friends.” Groups are for multiple individuals with similar interests. Groups are built by profiles. A profile builds a group. Groups have “members.” Pages are specifically designed for public figures and businesses. Pages are built by profiles. A profile builds and becomes an “admin” for a page. Pages have “fans.”
In the past, engaging with a page involved clicking a button called “become a fan,” hence the term “fan.” In 2010, Facebook replaced that vernacular with the “like” button. The change has resulted in an increased willingness of Facebook users to engage with Facebook pages. Anyway, the term “fan” is still regularly used to refer to page membership. Facebook pages can have multiple admins. You can add admins or remove them as circumstances change in your business. Also, when you become an admin for a page, it will not link back to your personal profile so it’s a great way to keep your business and personal lives separate.
Now, let’s take a look at how the Facebook facilities are different from each other.
If you want to see my profile, you have to jump over two hurdles to get there. First, you have to be on Facebook yourself. You have to have your own profile and be logged in. Second, you and I need to be Facebook “friends” for you to see my profile. There are a few exceptions to this. Facebook recently introduced new privacy settings that allow you to make your profile more public. But for most people, there are two hurdles to viewing a profile.
If you want to see my group, there’s only one hurdle you have to jump over. You have to have your own profile and be logged in, but you and I do not have to be friends for you to see my group. You can search for groups, find mine, and check it out without being friends with me.
If you want to see my page, there are zero hurdles. What does that mean? It means you don’t even have to be logged in to Facebook to check out my page. It means there’s no firewall. It means that pages are fully indexed by Google and the other search engines! Do you think Facebook ranks high on Google? Yes, indeed! Facebook is a huge website and Facebook pages rank high on Google. In fact, there are companies who have a Facebook page and a website, and when they search for their own company name on Google, their Facebook page ranks higher than their own website!
So that means there’s an opportunity for businesses in creating Facebook pages for themselves. But wait! You need to keep one thing in mind: the title of your Facebook page is the only thing you can’t change once you’ve selected it. Everything else you can change, but not the title. So you want to get it right the first time.
The title of your Facebook page is the most valuable from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. For those familiar with the HTML website coding language, it’s effectively your H1 tag. That’s valuable real estate so you want to include some keywords if possible (and appropriate). If you work for a large company that people are already searching for, fine. Just use the company name for your page title. But if you’re a self-employed service practitioner, you might want to include a few keywords beyond just your name. Would you call your page “Jane Smith?” No. Nobody is searching for “Jane Smith.” Instead, call it “Jane Smith Financial Advisor Boston MA.” There will be people searching for a financial advisor in Boston, so include those words in your page title.
Your Facebook page title is one of the only things you can’t change. You can at the beginning but once you have more than 100 fans, the title will become permanent and will no longer be editable. If you already have more than 100 fans and are now wishing you could go back and change your page title, chill. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just one of those little tricks that’s worth mentioning for those who are just getting started. So if you have less than 100 fans, consider adding a few keywords. If you have more than 100 fans, it’s probably not worth deleting it and building a new one. Stick with the one you have.
The important thing is to recognize the different facilities available on Facebook and how you can use them. Do not create a profile for your business. Profiles are for people, not businesses. Profiles that are created for businesses will eventually get deleted because they’re against the Facebook terms of service. Create a page for your business. All the new features such as Facebook Places and Facebook Deals (Chapter 74) are only accessible through pages, leaving businesses with profiles in the cold.
Facebook Profiles & Pages: Implementation Checklist
Create a Facebook profile for yourself.
Visit www.facebook.com/groups.
Search for your favorite keywords.
Visit www.facebook.com/pages.
Search for your favorite keywords.
Consider creating your own page.
Never create a profile for a business.
Add keywords to your page title.
Chapter 72: Facebook Message and Wall Posts
How do you communicate with your friends and fans?
This is another interesting topic on Facebook. Turns out, every facility you use (profiles, groups, or pages) has its own communication advantages. If I (my profile) want to send you (your profile) a message on Facebook, it will go into your Facebook inbox but you will also get e-mail notification (with the default settings). You’ll get an e-mail telling you that Patrick (me) sent you a message on Facebook, and you can read the message in either location.
To be clear, you can read my message in your regular e-mail inbox or you can log into Facebook and read my message in your Facebook inbox. The message is in both locations. It gets interesting with groups and pages. If a group wants to send a message to its members, the delivery depends on the number of members in the group. If the group has 5,000 or fewer members, the message will go to each member’s Facebook inbox and the group members will also get e-mail notification. If the group’s membership grows to 5,001 members or more, the e-mail notification goes away. That means the message only goes to the Facebook inbox. That’s a major problem. Why? Without the e-mail, if your members don’t regularly check their Facebook inbox they might not even realize they received a group-related message.
This is a major drawback of Facebook groups. When your group has fewer than 5,000 members, you have an extremely effective way of communicating with them. But once you cross the 5,000-member threshold, you lose that functionality and never get it back—unless you remove members to stay under that 5,000 limit (which some people do, by the way). It gets even worse with pages. As a page admin, there is no way to send a “message” to your fans. You can only send “updates.” So what’s an update? In your Facebook inbox, there are “messages” and “updates.” The default tab is messages and very few people read the updates. That means an update sent to your fans will get read by almost nobody.
If you want to communicate with your Facebook page fans, the best way to do it is to post on your page’s wall. Wall posts go into the Facebook user’s news feed and end up getting seen way more than updates. So let’s take a minute and talk about wall posts. Whether you’re posting on your profile wall, your group wall, or your page wall, the primary objective is interaction. Interaction leads to trust, and trust is an essential precursor to the purchase decision. You need trust first, and the fastest way to get it is by encouraging interaction.
One of the simplest things you can do when posting on your wall is to end your post with a question. What do you think? Any suggestions? Are we missing anything? Other ideas? How can we help? Who’s your favorite? What went wrong? Ah, yes. The power of a question! Questions tug at people’s subconscious. They beg for a response. They tickle people’s minds and invite new ideas. Bottom line: they encourage interaction. Using this one simple strategy will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your Facebook activity. And on your Facebook page, interaction is absolutely essential for building a broader fan base. Keep in mind that any time Facebook users make a comment on your page wall, that activity is also noted on their wall. That means their network is notified. It means their interaction spurs a viral process that can attract new fans. The more interaction you have, the more people find out about your page.
If you’re just getting started, your first milestone should be getting 300 fans. Once you have 300 or more fans, you’ll notice that your number of fans will start to grow on its own, especially if you’re actively encouraging interaction on your posts. Also, when people comment on your post, they’re automatically subscribed to subsequent comments. That means they’re notified when other people comment after them. So you can post something, accumulate a bunch of comments from interested fans, and then comment again yourself, knowing everyone will see your follow-up comment. These strategies are simple. It just boils down to a series of simple little tricks to maximize your effectiveness. It’s all about understanding platforms like Facebook and how they work and then leveraging them to achieve your objectives. Once you’re comfortable with the process, it’s easy.
Facebook Messages and Wall Posts: Implementation Checklist
Log into Facebook and visit your inbox.
Notice the “messages” and “updates” tabs.
If you have a page, send an “update.”
Measure the response you get.
Next, post something on the page wall.
Measure the response you get.
Always end wall posts with a question.
Add follow-up comments on wall posts.
Chapter 73: Facebook Tagging Photos
What’s the biggest opportunity on Facebook?
Tagging people on photos. Tagging people on photos has such huge potential and is so underutilized. Here’s how it works. Let’s say I take a photo of Susie, upload it to my Facebook page, and then tag her in the photo. What happens? Well, the photo shows up on my Facebook page. That’s where I uploaded it to. But it also shows up in Susie’s profile as “photos uploaded by others.” That means I can put a photo into Susie’s profile. Think about that! The photo also goes onto Susie’s wall. It says “Susie was tagged in a photo” and the photo will be there for her entire network to see.
Last year, I worked with a small winery. It was a very small family-owned operation and we hosted a public wine tasting to try and get more exposure for the place. We only charged a $5 entrance fee and marketed the event using offline channels. Lots of people showed up. When they entered, we had a table set up where they had to register. At that same table, they received their wineglass (included) and also got their first pour. So when they left the registration table, they already had wine in a wineglass. A few feet away, we had an area where the winery name and logo was displayed on the wall, and a photographer greeted people there. “Welcome. We’re thrilled you’re here. We’d love to take your photo. Is that okay?” Almost everyone said yes.
Think about these photos. They all had people smiling with wine in their hands and the name and logo of the winery in the background. These were branded photographs. That’s very important. They were basically advertisements! Right? I mean, it’s subtle but those photos were ads. After the event, we uploaded all the photos to the winery’s newly introduced Facebook page and tagged everybody. You need to be friends with people before you can tag them in photos so we gave everyone a full explanation of the process at the tasting. We had to send friend requests first but that was a small price to pay for the end result! We had about 180 photos and ended up with more than 100 people tagged. So those photos ended up in the profiles of more than 100 people. We basically put an advertisement into all of their profiles! Not only that, but the photos also appeared on the walls of those same 100 people. The awareness shot up immediately and the foot traffic increased the very next weekend.
Where do you interact with your customers or prospects? At trade shows? At a retail storefront? At events you host? Think about the opportunities you might have to take photos and tag people on Facebook. If you’re a real estate agent and you sell a house, you need to take a picture of your customers in front of the house and that “SOLD” sign. If you’re a contractor and just did a major renovation of someone’s kitchen, you need to take a picture of your happy customers in front of those beautiful granite countertops!
I worked with a shop that does pedicures for women. They started taking photos of these women’s feet and tagging them. You couldn’t even see the women’s faces. You only saw their feet with little flowers painted on their toenails. Before they uploaded the photos to Facebook, they brought them into Photoshop and added in their company name and phone number, subtly in the top right-hand corner. Over time, they accumulated dozens of photos—or advertisements—in the profiles of their customers.
Think about this stuff. How can you leverage it?
As a speaker, I create images of the cities I speak in with my head shot superimposed at the top. I add text explaining which conference I’m speaking at and the date. I upload the images to my page and tag myself in each one, bringing them into my profile as well. Whether you want to admit it or not, people are looking at your photos on Facebook. That’s what people do. People love photos. So when they’re looking at my photos, they see these images of cities all around the world. Without ever speaking to me, they see where I have spoken. It builds my credibility.
Tag people in branded photos. Find ways to capture your customers and prospects in situations that involve your products or services. If you do it once or twice, it won’t change your business one bit. But if you accumulate dozens or even hundreds of these photos, it’ll change your business forever.
Facebook Tagging Photos: Implementation Checklist
Where do you interact with customers?
Where could you interact with prospects?
Take photos that involve your products.
Bring the photos into Photoshop.
Subtly add your contact information.
Upload the photos to your Facebook page.
Tag the people featured in each photo.
Do this regularly, accumulating photos.
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