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Early last year I felt that Facebook was just a waste of time when using it for business. I didn’t understand it, and neither was I willing to give it the time others said I needed to give to become successful at using Facebook for business.
Now, 18 months on, my business page has over 11,000 fans and as a national and international trainer, speaker and consultant, my influence on Facebook brings in 80 per cent of my business directly or indirectly.
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So does Facebook work? Absolutely!
However, there are also some rules if you want to make it work, which I’ve learnt along the way.
You must be a true believer
If you don’t believe in Facebook, it won’t work for you. For you to understand it, you must invest time and find out what works for your business. Post different things and themes and find out what gets noticed and what doesn’t by monitoring your ‘insights’.
Then do more of what works, and plan and refine your posts from there.
You’ve got to be real
Your audience knows if you’re faking it. Be real to your audience and they will respect you too. Post things that place the person back into what you do. You can post straight business themes, or add some humour and personality and see your engagement factor grow. Having a happy or difficult day? Post it.
Understand the engagement language
Facebook is all about getting your audience to like, comment and share your posts. Once you start getting these things happening, Facebook algorithms will recognise that the ‘weight’ of your post is better than others and will start feeding it to more of your audience. Anything boring simply won’t get fed to your audience.
Facebook wants people’s newsfeeds to remain interesting, so they can keep on using Facebook.
Facebook is now monetised
This means if you want to grow your business successfully using Facebook without spending money, just forget it. It doesn’t work. Facebook has made things only to work now with investment. If you want to reach your audience and get more likes to your page, you will need to pay for an effective advert to do this with the right targeting. Then when you grow your audience, Facebook then wants you to pay to reach your audience by boosting your posts.
Think that’s double-dipping? When you consider Facebook has an audience bigger than the biggest country in the world, they really hold the cards of influence.
Set a budget and invest in Facebook, play by their rules and enjoy the results.
Be the expert
Establishing your audience is one thing, but when you have them, become the expert and feed them with useful information to assist your audience to solve their issues and problems. When you do so, they think you’re an expert and when they want to do business, they will want to do business with the person they think does it the best - you and your company.
At the end of the day, Facebook is a ‘like’ economy. The more interesting and real your posts are to your audience, the more they ‘like’ you. When they like you, they like what you’ve got, with your services.
You too can enjoy a regular stream of business using Facebook.
Just follow the rules!
