Facebook marketing that gets results on your personal page requires strategy and timing. Whether you’re a work-at-home Mom with a small biz, or you’re building your direct sales empire, you are your brand. That means many of your customers may also be your “friends”, and you’d love for some of your friends to become your customers. The key to facebook marketing success is to keep posts about your business social and infrequent. At the end of the day, your customers and friends really just want to see your cat, or your daughter celebrating a birthday. If it looks and sounds like an ad, don’t post it. You’ll get more engagement when you don’t ask people to buy or post a link.
Here are 5 Tips to Create an Amazing Facebook Post That Generates Leads and Drives Sales:
1. Take a poll: If we’ve learned anything from social media, it’s that people love to share their opinions. Find out what your friends like, and you’ll be able to give them exactly what they need so you can convert friends to customers. For example, if you have a product that comes in different colors, you could post: Red or Blue?
2. Use photos: A post without a photo is like eating a cookie without a glass of milk. Not as yummy. Instead of using pics from your website, take your own pic or use Google images to find photos that relate to your post and are more engaging and social. If there’s a cat in the photo, that’s even better.
3. Talk about the weather: Have you ever been in a city on a rainy day? Umbrella salesmen seem to pop up from out of nowhere. That’s called connecting with your ideal customer, and giving them exactly what they need. Rainy days (and snow days) motivate people to buy other things too. Shopping is like comfort food, it makes us feel good. Combine that with crappy weather depression, and you’ve got a perfect storm of friends spending way too much time on Facebook commenting on your weather-related post.
4. Add an offer: Add a few blurbs at the end of your poll to reward commenters, and connect with potential customers. Don’t go to crazy here, you’re not selling. Yet. You’re just letting everyone know that there may be a reward for joining the conversation.
5. Follow up with a PM: Send a personal inbox message to everyone who posted to thank them for commenting, let them know poll results and deliver on your offer. It should sound something like, “Hey Carol, thanks so much for joining the rainy day convo. Blue is my fave too! It won by a landslide. As promised, here’s your (offer). Stay dry. xoxo” Add a link to their poll choice that takes them right to the “Add to Cart” page on your website and you’ve got a winner! Sales, too!
Here’s how it all went down for me on a recent rainy day. This post generated hundreds of dollars in sales. Thank you Mother Nature! By the way, lavender won this one.
Lynn Bardowski is an award-winning entrepreneur and bestselling author of Success Secrets of a Million Dollar Party Girl. She speaks to global audiences about entrepreneurship, vision and branding and is a resource for press, media and bloggers. Like her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter. You may republish this article in full, as long as you list this paragraph and provide a link.
