The way you think about Facebook is probably wrong. This flawed thought process is holding you back.
Facebook is *not* your personal diary, something to be kept hidden from all except close friends and family.
Facebook is a distribution system to push messages to a list of people who are interested in you as an individual. It’s very similar to a mailing list. Once you accept that, you can use Facebook super successfully to drive traffic to anything you want. There is a ton of free traffic to be generated for your business, blog, app or website if you operate a Facebook Page properly.
This article will walk you through the steps to start off right.
Everything You Need To Know About Starting a New Facebook Page
Making a new Page is easy, just click here to bring up the appropriate menu and then follow the steps outlined below.
Step 1. Design the Page
- Choose a name. Generally you can make a Page about your product, business (such as a YouTube channel) or a general topic such as to share memes.
- Design Page avatar and banner: Make use of a great cover photo – Consider employing an expert either to design an excellent image for that cover photo or employ a digital photographer who are able to have a good picture of the product. Remember: design is marketing. Your cover photo must have personality to attract individuals otherwise, nobody will pay attention.
- Fill in the meta information. Optimize your ”About” information. You’re restricted to 165 characters of text, and these are keywords people will use to find your Page when performing searches so try to fill this section completely with words. Create a succinct and compelling message that will persuade folks to follow your Page and share it with others. Also don’t forget to to add your website URL.
Step 2. Populate the Page with content.
Use third party tools to reduce your content uploading workload.
- Hootsuite : This is a scheduling solution for multiple social media profiles, and is useful if you want to publish the same post to several social accounts at once. Recommended.
- Fan Page Robot: This cloud-based app will help you locate content to publish to your Page and what hashtags you should use. It has a built in scheduler so all you need to do is select what content you want to publish and the scheduler will figure out when to release it. Fan Page Robot incredibly powerful and I highly recommend using it, as it will save you hours of work.
- HashAtIt.com : This is a free search engine for locating hashtag content. It’s not as easy as using Fan Page Robot but it’s free.
- Hashtags.org : The most common directory of trending hashtags.
- TagDef : Similar to Hashtags.org but another alternative to assist you with locating hashtags.
Pin a particular status update at the very top. If there’s a specific status update you need to stay towards the top of your wall (such as to drive traffic to your website), then click the “Pencil” icon that says “Pin to Top.” This status update will remain at the top of your feed before any brand new status updates. You can always replace it later if you have another post you’d rather drive attention to.
Step 3. Invite your friends to like your Page.
Mass invite all your friends. The more friends you have, the most effective this will be.
To invite friends to like your Page:
- Click … on your Page’s cover photo
- Select Invite Friends
- Click the lists on the left or type a name in the search box to find friends
- Click the names of the friends you want to invite
- Click Send Invites
This will bring up a menu that allows you to invite the friends on your personal Facebook profile.
Step 4. Invite your email list to like your Page.
If you’ve been amassing a list of email contacts, then you can invite them to your Facebook page.
You can upload your email contacts so that they’ll see a suggestion to like your Page on Facebook.
To suggest your Page to your email contacts:
- Click … on your Page’s cover photo.
- Select Suggest Page.
- Upload a file or choose your email service and follow the on-screen instructions.
Keep in mind that this is limited to 5,000 email addresses or less. If your list is larger than that you’ll need to break it up into several smaller lists, and send the invites out over several days.
If you have the budget you can explode your Facebook fan page’s exposure with the use of ads. Use Power Editor to build Custom Audiences from mailing lists. This allows you to target users based on demographics, location, gender, income and so on.
Tip: Do you have a LinkedIn profile? You can use your LinkedIn contacts to get emails. Just export your Contacts list.
Step 5. Maintain
- You have to regularly post content to your Page in order for Facebook to continue promoting it to your Page followers. Pages that receive little engagement generally get filtered out of people’s status update feed, and the only way to avoid that is to have a fair amount of engagement. This means in addition to ‘liking’ your own posts you should also ‘like’ the comments people leave on your Page. You can even reply back to them and this will help your Page engagement metrics.
- Every morning and night before bed, go to Notifications. For all posts that receive engagement, invite new engagers to ‘like’ your Page and respond to the messages they leave you.
- Keep Page content scheduled by using Fan Page Robot. Seriously this is an awesome app that saves you a ton of time. Click here to read my review of Fan Page Robot.
Conclusion
I hope this short guide has given you enough information on how to build an audience using your Facebook Page. If you have any additional questions ask away in the comments field below!
You can also purchase my detailed Facebook guide off Amazon for just $0.99
Facebook Marketing: Guide to Strategies That Don’t Suck
By the way: if you’re looking for more information on how to be successful on YouTube, considering purchasing my book
The Lean Channel: YouTube for Entrepreneurs
You can order the book off Amazon, as a Kindle eBook or the more traditional print version. It’s just $2.99.
