Wednesday, 1 February 2012

Increasing and Retaining Customers Using Facebook

If you are planning on using Social Media to grow your SMB, Facebook is an essential component.  A good place to start when determining how to use Facebook for your business is Facebook's comprehensive business guilde; available here.

There are limitations on what you can do with your business page on Facebook but there are still lots and lots of benefits to setting up and actively using a business page.

SEO

One of the added benefits (that sometimes gets overlooked) of using Facebook in your online strategy is that Facebook scores very well in organic search results.  Not to mention the backlink of adding your website to Facebook provides additional SEO benefit to your website.  Try looking for Carlyn Services Inc, or carlynservicesinc, on Google and notice that Carlyn Service's Facebook page is generally in the first 5-7 results returned.  The more avenues for your business to be found online the better it is for your business.

Getting Ahead of the Curve

Right now, Facebook and Search are separate but with more and more people, places and things finding a page on Facebook you have to wonder how long that reality will exist.  What I mean by that is, is it going to make sense to leave Facebook and go to Google to look up the closest dentist when every dentist nearby has a Facebook page?  More and more people are already using Facebook to find local businesses, get ahead of the curve now and get a Facebook page for your business.

Events, Photos, Specials and Video, Video, Video

Facebook's statistics page tells us that "the average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events."  80!  As a business you can't afford to be losing out on business by not having a share in the 80 connections the average user makes.  Put on events, create specials and deals, post pictures of employees and customers and most importantly make videos of anything and everything.  If you do all of these you are sure to have more connections than most of your competitors. 

As we discussed in the Twitter post last week, the importance of video is increasing daily.  People love to watch and listen on their computers.  Position yourself as an expert in the field of your business and create instructional videos on your expertise.  Putting on an event?  Videos.  Have a happy customer?  Testimonial videos.  Ever wanted to make a commercial?  Hire a video production company to create one for you.  They are less expensive than you realize.  Videos, videos, videos!

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