10 Tips to Gain More Exposure on Facebook

If you’re like most companies, your Facebook business page is meant to build connections with new prospects and solidify relationships with existing customers. Facebook’s switch to Timeline facilitates these goals by providing a more visually-engaging and user-friendly format for displaying content that showcases the entire history of your brand’s Facebook posts in chronological order. By doing so, Facebook has made it easier to reach out to your target audience and gain more exposure for your business.

If you’re unsure how your brand can capitalize, here are 10 actionable tips that will help you gain more exposure on your Facebook business page:

Create a Visual Experience - With the addition of Timeline, your Facebook page should be as visually appealing as possible.  The top of the Timeline features a large banner image; this is an ideal place to show off your business. Use your company logo, a picture of the business, or a team picture of your employees. Make sure the business name or logo is in plain view.¹Form Connections – Think of your Facebook brand page as an interactive blog that tells your story and encourages user engagement.  Use your brand page to connect with new prospects and form deeper relationships with existing customers. Be as creative as possible, and determine which activities or apps will best support your company’s brand message and facilitate interaction with your fans. Personalize your brand; show your company’s human side.Post Relevant Content – It’s easier to form deeper connections with prospects and customers if you’re providing solid value by offering enticing content that fans find entertaining, informative or useful (blog posts, e-books and white papers, survey results, webinar invites, You Tube videos, etc.). Whatever you post, make sure it’s relevant to your target audience.Avoid Jargon - Posts that use buzzwords or business jargon like “optimize” significantly decrease the number of fans for a Facebook page. According to inbound marketing specialists Hubspot, these pages have 100 fans, as opposed to the average page with 624 fans.Make Your Content Sharable  - To increase your Facebook exposure, you need to design offers and content that will motivate people to “like” or “share” your page. This will turn fans into brand evangelists, providing your content the exponential reach it deserves.  In this way, Facebook can serve as a powerful tool for business promotion.Encourage Photo Tagging- Tagging photos can be a very effective way to promote your business and engage customers. Take pictures of your business, of employees in action, or of your products, and tag them with your Facebook business page profile. Tagged photos will appear in the series of five thumbnail images at the top of the Facebook business page.¹Promote User Check-Ins – Facebook Check-ins show up on a user’s Timeline and let everyone else in their social network know that they were at your place of business. 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations on social media.² Make sure to leverage such user-generated content by encouraging customers to let their social network know they do business with you.Target the Friends of Fans – Don’t be afraid to target the friends of your current fans to increase your fan base. When a friend of your fan likes your page, this will appear in the news feed because your fan is connected to two entities – their friend and your page.³Offer a Unique Promotion – Build up hype for your brand by running a promotion that really engages your fan base. For example, Verizon wireless runs a weekly contest where fans can send in a pic of themselves in a unique locale; the winner’s photo is then posted on Verizon’s Facebook page as the banner picture. Remember to align any promotions with your company’s marketing strategy (Verizon markets itself as the carrier with the largest network, therefore showing pics of people all over the world makes sense).Experiment with Sponsored Stories/Paid Ads - You can pay Facebook to highlight an activity or post as a “Sponsored Story” with the theory that such posts will gain more exposure with fans.  Facebook allows you to repurpose older posts or create new ones, giving you an opportunity to resurrect older material and call attention to it once again.

Facebook Ads are more straightforward: you create a message to share, and choose the demographic you want to reach. Thanks to Facebook’s success aggregating data from its 900 million-strong user base, you can really drill down ad targeting with incredible accuracy.

These 10 actionable tips will help you gain exposure for your Facebook page by building connections with new prospects and solidifying relationships with existing customers.

What steps are you taking to gain more exposure on your Facebook business page?

¹ PC World, “Use Facebook Timeline to Promote Your Business”

² Socialnomics, “39 Social Media Statistics to Start 2012”

³ JPL Creative, “Facebook Brand Pages–The Free Ride is Over”

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Posted in: Exposure, Facebook