“There’s always the opportunity to cut a corner, sacrifice lifestyle quality and suck it up as we race to grab a little more market share.”
Seth Godin’s blog posts always contain nuggets of wisdom, but this one is outstanding. In the constant drive to cut costs everywhere – junk products, government programs and services, corporate production costs and taxes, it’s time we all took a moment to read The Race to the Bottom.
image via Crunchbase
More and more small and sole proprietor businesses are realizing the importance of a presence on Facebook through a Facebook business page. Those who create pages want to induce “likes” to raise their status, their credibility, and to get their message out to as many people as possible -because everyone just loves to hear you go on about how cool you are and how good your business is to work with, right? Well, people who really really like you personally may be willing to spend their valuable time visiting your Facebook page, see a continuous stream of self-promotion and advertisements. Funny thing about social media and Facebook, it’s as easy for your Likers to un-like you as it was to like you in the first place.
For small business, social media is about 2-way communication, engagement, not advertising. People who are likely to be active in social media do not want to be advertised to. So how do you do a business page that is engaging, yet still lets people know about your business? Simple. Make it interesting. Sorry to break it to you, but your real estate listings, the number of new clients you added this month, or tedious stats about your industry don’t interest me. And when you think about it they don’t interest very many others except your relatives, raving fans, or folks that have lots of time on their hands. So why not do a few things to make your business page more interesting:
Monitor your page. Thank people for their comments on all the interesting content you have produced. Encourage them to post something on the same theme. Be friendly. Be nice. The world is watching.
Facebook pages have incredible, free analytics called Insights. Quickly monitor demographics, likes, and interests of your page visitors. Are you hitting your target demographic? What is interesting to them? Correct as necessary.
[stextbox id=”grey” caption=”Personal Case Study”]I have 2 Facebook business pages. One is strictly real estate; not just listings, but relevant RE news stories, local market conditions, my RE blog posts, and it has a real estate URL. It has an average growth of <1 “liker” a day and at this writing has 678 likers. Engagement level is virtually nil. My other business page has listings, real estate news, market conditions, my RE blog posts, AND local news, humor, wacky news, posts from my Memphis blog, local commentary pictures of anything I think is interesting about Memphis, video of neighborhoods, events, music acts, and posts from followers of the page. It has been up for about a quarter the time the RE page has. It has an average growth of >10 “likers” per day and has 3180 likers. Engagement level is quite good. Get the message?[/stextbox]
Rain in the MASE Parking lot
I was drenched by the time I got inside, but I had a great day at Memphis’ first Tribe Camp. Inspired by Seth Godin‘s book, Tribes, and sponsored by Social Media Expedition, Launch Memphis, and Lunaweb, the day was filled with a wide variety of presentations running the gamut from photography, to ghost blogging, to writing for the web, social media, SEO, Free as a business model, essential WordPress plugins, toughening and nurturing the tribe and much more. The networking and discussions were powerful, and and the rain didn’t dampen the success of the event.
Preparing for the big day - Meet up at South of Beale, Downtown
Lineup of presenters for morning sessions
Check-in at Tribe Camp
Mike Synk
Big thanks to the folks at MASE – Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering for a perfect venue!
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