Facebook. The biggest social network in the world. With memberships skyrocketing towards the 1 billion mark, its current population makes it the third largest nation in the world!
What does this mean for your business? More than likely, lots of your customers are on Facebook. Also and more importantly – lots of your customers and potential customers can be talking about your business on the social network.
Many Social Media strategies will focus solely on having a Facebook page, a presence, to help with your customer engagement and marketing. But this is 2012. Having a Facebook presence was so 2011. Now is the time to start building your Facebook pages into locations on the web where you customers can interact, engage, be rewarded and drive your revenue through the usage of Social Commerce, and/or Facebook’s own commerce facility: F-Commerce.
Social Media is not about selling. It’s about building the relationships which then drive the sales. So why not beef up your Facebook page with some tailored Apps to make it more ‘sticky’ – that is, have more activity on there. You can even give your visitors the opportunity to directly purchase from you.
Here are a few Facebook Apps that will help you achieve this:
Livechat for Fan Pages (Paid) – want to provide customer service in real-time through Facebook. This app lets you talk to your customers. Imagine the potential of solving someone’s complaint through this instant messenger service.
Forums for Pages (Free) – Does your business have current hot topics or issues you want your customers to engage in? What about ideas your customers help build? This app allows your customers to contribute to your businesses discussions.
Fan of the Week for Pages (Free) – why not reward one of your pages fans once per week for their activity on your page. This not only helps build a stronger relationship with your fans, it also helps get them to promote their winnings to their network.
Events Calendar (Free) – do you have real world events that you want your customers to attend, but don’t want to send out a whole heap of Facebook event invites (annoying?). Build a Calendar and promote it. You can load your events, and customers can click through to each Facebook event you link.
Maichimp (Free) – Since your customers and potential customers are spending so much time on Facebook, why not get them to join your e-newsletter risk whilst they are there. A simple form delivers subscriber information straight into your Mailchimp Database.
Payvment (Free) – want to sell directly through Facebook? With over 1.1 million users of this app, Payvment allows you to set up a Facebook store and sell your products / services directly.
BigCommerce (Free) – one of Australia’s fastest growing companies, BigCommerce allows you to add a shopfront to your Facebook page, providing you with an optimum Social Commerce Solution.
So that’s just a few ways you can add some more value to your Facebook page, increase your customer activity, engage with potential new customers and make the page more shareable. If most of your customers are on Facebook, why not make your page a place they want to re-visit over and over again?
The more people there are talking about your brand, the stronger your brand becomes. My theory is – Build it and they will come.
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