Simple Facebook Promotion strategies

October 3, 2010 by Doug Mcisaac

Simple promotion strategies or ways to get fans to your page:

Invite Them

Inviting them through invite a friend. This works great if you have frinds that you know would like to join the page, but do not barrage all of your friends with this unless you are 100% sure that it’s something that they are interested in.

Ask Them

Ask them to invite their friends through invite a friend – same as above, can work well, but request that they invite people that they think would be interested.

Advertise

Run Facebook ads – honestly the most effective way to get your page past a “hump-. It happens on all pages your initial push gets you a bunch of fans and then everythigns slows down. Using ads is the quickest, easiest way to get things going again.

The “ninja” trick is to run ads against friends of people who are fans. The ads show with their friends names on it, most people do not realize that it’s a paod ad, they think it’s a suggestion from Facebook.

Contests

Have a contest – I’ve seen lots of great viral contests. This can explode you page, but contest people can be difficult to get engaged. They aren’t there because theya re interested in your page, they are there because they are interested in your contest. There are lots of ways to do contests that keep people engaged.

Tag em

You can tag people you know in a post about the page, do it sparingly because you don;t want to be blocked because of "tag spam"

Have a Party

Have a tagging party and tag other pages that you think your fans will like. This is something Mari Smith just started, it’s similar to a Follow Friday thing from Twitter. It will get you new fans, but they won’t be the most engaged.

Email them

Send an email to your current customer list. This assumes you have a list, but don’t just say “fan us on Facebook” give them a reason to go there. Restaurants could say check our Facebook page for our daily specials, a retail store could have Facebook only specials or even post a word or phrase of the day for discounts.

Ask Them 2

Ask your customers – assumes that you talk to them either on the phone or in your store. But give them a reason to fan your page.

Use Your Username

Add your Facebook.com/Username to your business card, your print ads and TV ads.

NEVER say Find us on Facebook without giving them your custom username. That’s like saying find us in the phonebook. I cringe every time I see someone with an ad campaign that does that. Do a Facebook search on the first 10 brand names that come to mind and look at the results. How many of those pages do you want your customers landing on? Probably not the “BrandX is cruel to animals” or I hate BrandX” pages.

Can’t find 25 fans to get your username, run ads on Facebook use one of the other examples above or if all else fails go to Fiverr.com and get 50 for $5. Don’t fool yourself the “fans” from Fiverr won’t be real people who will engage with your page, but they will get you your username.

Hand it out

Print your address on your business card – Tell people why they should check out your page

Fan Box

Add Facebook Fan Box to your website – I recommend showing the recent posts and at least two rows of faces. You will get more people who go to your website to join your fan page.

Go ahead and add your promotion ideas in the comments. In a couple of days I will dig into ways to get more engagement on your page.

My Top Ten Social Media Marketing Mistakes

September 5, 2009 by Doug Mcisaac

My Top ten social media marketing mistakes

Mistakes I made following other Guru’s advice BEFORE I found Social Traffic

Facebook Mistakes

1. Friend everyone that they find on their favorite gurus friends list or group without so much as explaining why they are friending them. I actually said where I saw them on most of the friend requests.

2. Accept friend requests from people like the ones above –if someone isn’t interested enough in you to tell you where they met you then the odds are you will never have a real conversation. Most of my real interactions on Facebook are with people I’ve at least talked to on Skype.

3. Slap up a group and start inviting everyone in my friends list. – worked a little, but I didn’t get any get real traction because I didn’t give people a good reason to be engaged in my group.

4. Send out info about affiliate products without first asking my audience what they were interested in.

5. I didn’t engage my audience enough – with my group of 500+ would get one or two comments if I was lucky when I posted something on the wall

Twitter Mistakes

6. Went down the wall of my favorite Guru and added everyone following them.

7. Set up a DM that was something like the following – “Thanks for following me, I have tons of free information at Online4Offline.com” – I received a couple of hundred newsletter sign ups from a thousand or so friend requests. Before someone reads that and thinks it’s a good idea that was a year ago before everyone and their dog was doing spammy DMs.

8. Signed up for a friendadder service that FLOODED my DM box with spam. I left that quickly and stopped auto-following everyone back.

Digg and other social bookmarking site mistakes

9. Bookmarked my own sites across multiple accounts. Occasionally I would slip in another link or two.

10. Digg banned three of my accounts including my main which I wasn’t using for the spammy stuff. This happened when using strategies and software recommended by a well known Digg guru.
Since finding Simon Ford and Social Traffic I’ve learned to focus on creating and sharing good content that other people will read, share and comment on. Tell me some of the things you were told to do when you got started with social media:

Great Twitter Stories

August 2, 2009 by Doug Mcisaac

Recapping some of my favorite Twitters tories from the week starting witha great post from the always informative Chris Brogan. While some will argue with Chris’ take on Twitter etiquette, I think he nails it on alomst every point. Check it out and let me know what you think:

A Brief and Informal Twitter Etiquette Guide

I love Twitter. I think the service is a wonderful tool that permits a whole new way of communicating. The thing is, it’s also a place where newcomers might often make some mistakes in their choices that will likely be …

I found this post interesting because I’ve been speaking in front of a number of local business groups an the most common question is “Isn’t Facebook/Twitter/Social Networking just for kids?” They are always surprised to find out the demographics of the main sites and the dramatic increase in 35+ on Facebook an Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter are for oldies — NevilleHobson.com

If you pay attention to such metrics as have been published over the past year, it probably won’t surprise you to note that the older you are, the more likely you will be to be a Facebook or Twitter user, according to the study. …

I like this idea, but feel it will have limited application for me and the others in less populated states like Montana.

JustBought.It Turns Twitter Into a World of Mobile Shoppers

It’s no secret that people often buy things based on the recommendation of a family member, friend, or celebrity that they respect. And now, with.

Twitter has changed tehir look, I’ll have to go back and redo my Twitter Getting started videos now 🙂 is changing

Twitter Blog: New Front Page!

Today we’re trying a redesigned front page for folks who are new to Twitter.com. If you’re a regular around these parts, then you won’t notice the new look unless you sign out of your account. Helping people access Twitter in more …

Thanks for stopping by to see my weekly recap. This is going to become a feature of my blog so let me know if you have great stories for me to share.

I’ll be adding some of my favorite Facebook stories in a couple of days.

Doug

FaceBook Vanity URLs — Are you Getting Yours?

June 10, 2009 by Doug Mcisaac

I was going to write up about this, but Mari’s post here is great:

Here are a couple of reasons to want a vanity URL:

1. It makes it easier for people to find you and if you have a common name like “John Smith” you will want to jump on it early.

2. It’s easier to add to a business card — many of us have been adding our Twitter ids, now we can add our facebook profiles as well.

3. Fan Pages will be powerful for businesses, especially businesses that use their keywords in their name. — You have to have an existing fan page to be able to access this right now.

What are your thoughts?

Doug