5 Facebook Strategies to Generate Leads
Do you believe that social media can help you personally and professionally?
I have been attending social media webinars and workshops to learn how to use social media platforms more effectively. A webinar is a very popular way for subject matter experts to grow their email lists and sell their more expensive products. In my opinion, webinars are a mixed bag, some of them are good and others are not worth your time. Some of the better ones provide so much good information that you can get results just using the free content provided. Right now, I am not buying anything until I have taken the time to go through all the courses that I have already bought. I have written about LinkedIn and Twitter, but today the focus is primarily on using Facebook to effectively to generate leads.
Further Reading
Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile
7 Big Trends That Will Change Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
These days, I am working on getting the best results possible from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and I am writing about what I am learning because I am sure that others can learn from my experiences. I am not there yet. I am in the information gathering phase, and am also trying to figure out what I am doing incorrectly, and how to turn things around. What I am noticing though, is that although the experts talk about ideal clients, they do not spend sufficient time talking about how to determine who your ideal client is, and perhaps I am expecting too much from them. But if you have not clearly identified your ideal client, you are wasting your time and will not achieve the social media goals you establish for yourself. I know, and that’s why I am going back to the basics to build a strong foundation. In the past, I created reader profiles for my blog, but it was based on guesswork, now I am reading Buyer Personas
to discover how to identify my ideal client the right way.
In a recent webinar with Amy Porterfield, she shared some great strategies on how to get your Facebook page running the right way. And it’s interesting to me, that many of the strategies, are similar to the ones I learned for LinkedIn and Twitter. This indicates that there are best practices for all the social media platforms, and to get the best results, we need to follow these practices.
Use a Timeline Cover Photo
How To Make Money Online
As with LinkedIn and Twitter, your Facebook cover photo is the first thing people see when they visit your fan page. You have to wow fans with a cover photo, so have a well-designed one. The size of the cover photo is 851 x 315 pixels. Make sure you include your contact information, call to action and price if it’s appropriate, and most importantly, to complete every section. You can create a well-designed cover photo using graphic design tool Canva, which already has a Facebook cover photo template. Sign up for a free Canva account and get started. In the Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile post mentioned above, there are links to downloadable templates for your LinkedIn Cover photo, I used one of the templates that I liked, uploaded it to Canva and worked with it. You can do something similar.
Can your audience easily get from your Facebook personal page to your fan page? On your personal page, where you have your workplace, hover over the link to see the preview. If the preview is not of your fan page – you can easily change. You will see an icon of a pencil displayed to the right, click on it, then type in the name of your Facebook fan page, then save it. Now, when your audience clicks on where you work, they will see your fan page, which is another opportunity for you to get more likes.
Tabsite Blog
Get Your First 1,000 Facebook Fans
It appears that the magic number of fans to get traffic to your website is 1,000, but how do you do that when you are new to Facebook or have been on it for a while, but haven’t gotten the results you expected? Some people you are connected to on your personal Facebook page may be interested in your business, so you may want to invite them to like your fan page. An idea that Amy Porterfield recommended that I really liked, is using the search box on Facebook to type in a search such as “Pages liked by fans of X” where X is someone who has a similar fan base to you. Visit the pages of those people to see what kind of posts, their audience likes, shares and comments on.
I also like the strategy that AJ Amyx uses, which I mentioned in detail in the Social Media – Friend or Foe? blog post. For example, he recommends:
“Make a list of the five top speakers, five authors, five podcasters, five associations, and five thought leaders in your industry, follow them and follow some of their followers.”
When you have made a list of the five top speakers in your niche, and let’s say, one of those speakers is Brendon Burchard, then in the search box, type “Pages liked by fans of Brendon Burchard,” evaluate the content that gets shared and liked. This is a consistent way to build your fan base.
Facebook Social Plugin
Amy Porterfield is a firm believer in using the Facebook like box. If your website is powered by WordPress, there are several plugins that do the job. The premise is that if there is a “like box” on your website, more visitors will like your Facebook page, and they are not leaving your website. I have social media connect with me plugins on my website, so I will not implement this one.
Stay Away from Promotional Posts
Your audience does not like promotional posts in your news feed, instead if you would like to promote a product or an event, use a Facebook ad.
If you are going to promote in your news feed, there are tasteful ways to do it:
- Send people to your website where you add value in a post – so it’s not simply about the event or product.
- Use video to connect with the audience and make sure you give value.
- Use the post to build your email list so send them to an opt-in page where you give them a valuable gift in exchange for their name and email.
Create Irresistible, Shareable Content
![How to Get More Likes on Your Facebook Posts [Infographic]](https://i0.wp.com/www.postplanner.com/hubfs/blog_post_images/How_to_Get_More_Likes_on_Your_Facebook_Posts.jpg?ssl=1)
Learn how to craft a shareworthy post to get engagement – more likes, shares and comments. Shareable content has certain elements:
- Include images.
- Real, personal, simple and valuable.
- Post joins in vs interrupts.
Examples of shareable content on Facebook include inspirational quotes, funny photos, and questions. Beth Hayden, on her webinar, “3 Little-Known Secrets for Creating Captivating Content People Can't Wait to Read & Share,” recommends using BuzzSumo to identify what topics are popular, then put your unique spin on it. The good thing about Buzzsumo is that it displays the number of shares for each social media channel, so you can easily see how the post is doing on Facebook.
Social Media Examiner
Getting the results from social media that you crave requires that you follow best practices and try a few of the Facebook strategies mentioned in this post.
Get Started Here – I want to help you get started on your learning journey. Read The Invisible Mentor 2015 Reading Challenge, then Join the Facebook Group for the Reading Challenge today, connecting the ideas from the books you read!
In the meantime, THANK YOU for your time… Thank you for sharing this post, and thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest! What was your biggest takeaway from today?
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