One of the most important elements of Facebook, is to understand that native video is more visible, and gets more reach in the Facebook news feed.
For small and medium sized organisations targeting local audiences it is a great idea to develop a Facebook video strategy.
The key is to make your videos appeal to local people, by adding some fun, sharing a small tip, or specifically promoting other businesses.
Local still images also work, but to a lesser extent.
However, if your business doesn’t naturally generate interesting images in it’s own right, (let’s face it it’s tough selling insurance, or pensions advice, for example), interesting local shots of what’s happening in your area can generate interest.
Photos and videos of your customers, and Facebook followers, help visibility with the friends of your customers. The key is to encourage people to tag themselves in your photographs.
It’s important to remember that a ‘page’ cannot tag a ‘fan’ unless the admin is a personal friend of that person. Only people can tag other people, or people can tag themselves.
Important, and really easy to do, is to simply thank your customers from time to time, post an image, and tell your community how much you appreciate them.
Promote other pages in your community by sharing their posts, commenting on them and tagging them. This leads to them doing likewise.
Use reviews and recommendations, and make sure that you respond to all reviews promptly, whether they’re good or bad. It’s a good idea to reward regular customers, in some way, to write a review.
As we’re always saying to all our clients, you must build an e-mail database, again an incentive to opt in from your Facebook page to your list is the best way.
It’s important to remember that people are on Facebook to have fun, it’s not the same as an urgently sought Google search (like say, Emergency Vet in Dorset at Midnight on a Saturday), so it’s good to use humour in Facebook posts.
More importantly than all this is to understand that Facebook is simply a low cost tool in the digital marketplace that takes some effort to generate some reward.
There are others!
If your own resources are limited, the very best thing you can do is use an outside agency to sort all this out for you.
The key to making it work is to not pay them too much!
That definitely improves your ROI!
Call us at Top Cat Media, we can fix all the above for a relatively modest cost.