How to Promote Your Small Business on Facebook

Every small business should be on social media, especially Facebook. From its powerful advertisement options to Facebook groups, Facebook has many tools small businesses can and should use. A solid Facebook presence helps you engage potential customers and grow your business.

"Having a Facebook page helps to legitimize your business in the customer's eye," said Jake McKenzie, content manager for AutoAccessoriesGarage.com. "Or another way to look at it is a business without a Facebook profile may seem outdated at the best or untrustworthy at worst."

With so many ways to promote your business on Facebook, it can be difficult to know where to start. Here are six easy steps to make Facebook work for you.

1. Create a business page.

If you want to have a solid and professional Facebook presence, you need to create a separate page for your business – your personal Facebook profile won't cut it. A page is like a regular profile, but it's for brands and business. Also, instead of asking to "friend" someone, users must  "like" a page to see its posts.

When you set up your Facebook page, you'll notice there are a lot of options to customize it. You should add as much information about your business as possible, including your address, contact information, website, business hours, products, etc. It's important to also add profile and cover photos that reflect what your business does.

2. Post regularly.

To use Facebook to promote your business, you need to do more than set up a Facebook page – you need to use it and post regularly.

"Post as frequently as you can and, at a minimum, once per day," said Katie Campbell, social media manager at Fundera. "Your audience and customers want to feel like they know your business and can relate to you."

While it's important to post regularly, it's just as important to post quality content. Campbell suggests posts that share behind-the-scenes information and photos about your employees and that shows off your products or services. This shows your dedication to transparency and quality.

If you're unsure what your customers want to see, experiment. You can use Facebook's poll features to ask what they want to see or take a look at Facebook Page Insights, which helps take the guesswork out of sharing.

Facebook Insights is free for every business page and shows valuable information, such as how many people engage with each post and how many people it reaches.

3. Promote your page.

What good is sharing and creating great content if no one sees it? Fortunately, there are ways to build a following on Facebook. When you first create your page, send invites through Facebook to your current customers.

Traditional marketing techniques can also help you grow your audience. You should put a link to your Facebook page in your email signature and on your business cards. It's also good practice to include all of your social profiles on your website and any marketing materials you produce.  

Put a special coupon or promotion on your Facebook page, and tell customers to like your page to get the deal. If you create a simple and memorable Facebook URL, it's easier to promote it.

4. Engage your followers.

Facebook's new algorithm favors posts and pages that create engagement. Before posting anything on Facebook, you should ask yourself if it will create a conversation. It's also important to remember that Facebook is a social media platform, so you should be social.

"Businesses should interact with followers by responding to customer comments, questions and concerns," Campbell told Business News Daily. "Use your Facebook page for what it's meant to be: a social site. Get to know your customers' needs by hosting polls and responding to reviews."

The key to engagement is posting quality content. For best results, try to be friendly and conversational. Keep updates timely and respond to comments and private messages.  

5. Leverage friends of fans.

People are most likely to try something if their friends already use it.

"Social media is the new 'word-of-mouth.' You want people to be able to tag your business when they're talking about you," said Cat Smith, owner of Get Social with Cat. "Your customers are your best advocates."

When customers interact with your page, their friends will see the activity in their newsfeeds. You can also foster more interactions using polls and asking questions followers want to answer.

Encourage customers to check in to your business on Facebook when they visit by offering a small discount for anyone who does. Checking allows users to notify their friends where they are. Host a contest or sweepstakes and encourage users to post about your business.

You can also create special events and limited-time promotions and invite your followers, who can invite their friends in turn.

6. Try Facebook ads.

If you're having problems reaching users organically, try Facebook ads. Promoted Facebook posts look like regular posts but are highly targeted and reach more people.

Facebook's tools are very effective and make it easy to target a specific audience. You can target people who like your page or by location, age, gender and interests. Because Facebook collects user data, it can target your advertisement to those who are most likely to be interested in your product or service.

The platform also features an analytics tool to helps you understand which ads drive interest and sales.

ADVERTISEMENT

Source: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com

Image Credit: tongcom photographer/Shutterstock

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

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7 Tips to Avoid Getting the Email Cold Shoulder

This is an excerpt of a recent email I received--and a good example of one that will get deleted in record time. As a venture investor in early stage startup companies, I receive a steady stream of email pitches like this every day.

Unfortunately, all of them get the deleted without a reply. There might be a nugget among the daily onslaught, but I have never seen a company come over the transom ("cold") that resulted in a great exit.

The only investment opportunities I'll consider reviewing come through referrals from founders, VCs, or trusted industry veterans. "Ok, great Chris," you're thinking. "I live in Boca Raton, Florida, and I don't know anyone in the venture business, or anyone in Silicon Valley. What am I supposed to do? How can I connect with you and avoid the delete key?"

I'm glad you asked. Here are suggested steps to help you rise above the noise, and make the right connections to get a proper referral:

 1. Connect to a connector.

It's easy to go to LinkedIn to see my connections and discover our common connections. If there are none, find someone who you can approach, send a request, and begin to build a relevant network.

You can also search outside LinkedIn. For example, you can follow me on Twitter and Angel List (and, of course, Inc.com).

 

2. Join an incubator or accelerator.

There are hundreds of accelerators across the country, in almost every town and major city. Most accelerators have a network of local investors and entrepreneurs, and some of those people will allow you to leverage their extended networks. Undoubtedly there will be a Silicon Valley connection within that network.

 

3. Research your target's interests.

Like everyone else, I have personal interests and social causes that I am actively involved in. I love to cycle, and I am drawn to people who are fitness focused. I also co-founded a non-profit called The Last Mile that has very strong touch points in the technology, philanthropy, and investment communities.

 

4. Send me something of value, article, introduction, etc.

When I invest in a company, there is a value exchange. I provide money and expertise for equity in your company.

You can start that value exchange long before I take a meeting with you. Find some information or article that might interest me, or some book recommendations. I'm always looking for interesting (and unusual) books.

 

5. Become a published domain expert.

There are many platforms upon which you can express your opinions or provide information that is relevant to your domain focus. Anyone can create a Medium account and share their writing on social media. You can answer (and ask) questions on Quora, and you can do the same on Whale (one of my portfolio companies).

Find an outlet and be consistent.

 

6. Show up at meet-ups and conferences.

Network, network, network. Find local meet-ups that cater to entrepreneurs, your domain, or your hobby. You need to dedicate time to meet people and share your ideas.

Networking is easy for some, and difficult for others. If it's difficult for you, find a "wing person" who can help generate conversations, and make you more comfortable in these situations.

 

7. Take a trip to Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley is still the center of the innovation universe, and visiting here will expose you to driven entrepreneurs, in the most competitive market in the world. You never know who you'll bump into in a coffee shop, restaurant, or at a local event. If you can't get to Silicon Valley, go to New York City, Los Angeles, Austin, Boulder, or any other innovation hub and start networking.

So, please don't make me hit delete. Try a few of these tips, and see if they lead to green.

Seriously, I look forward to hearing from you through someone in my network--and if I do, I'll gladly take a meeting. Good luck and happy networking.

Source- https://www.inc.com
Image Credit: Getty Images

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

Are Twitter Emojis a Growing Business Trend?

Social media has completely changed the way businesses communicate with customers. Instead of the same dry, text-filled marketing messages, businesses are finding new and interesting ways to get their messages across. One such technique is the use of Twitter emojis.

In fact, Twitter recently released some ideas for ways brands can work emojis into their Tweets. Here are some ways you can use emojis to enhance your Twitter marketing.

Add Some Personality

One of the great things about social media is that it lets brands connect with customers on a more personal level. So you don’t need to be super professional and mundane in every Tweet. In fact, showing off your personality, or the personality that you want to portray for your brand, can be a real asset on social media. And emojis can be a really great tool for showing off that personality.

In the example from Toca Boca above, the addition of the little party emoji at the end of the Tweet adds a bit of personality that sets this message apart from all those other plain “Happy New Year” Tweets that brands put out. It’s a small thing. But it fits with the company’s branding and gives it just enough of an extra boost to set it apart from the competition.

Give Followers a Glimpse of Your Offerings

You have a limited amount of characters to work with on Twitter. So you probably don’t have enough room to show customers all of what they might see if they clicked on your website or did business with you. But certain emojis can say a lot without taking up a lot of those precious Tweet characters. So you can use them to give customers a sort of sneak preview of your offerings.

In the example above, travel company Locatour is promoting a blog post that includes some ideas for things to do in the Aquitaine region of France. The emojis in the Tweet offer a little preview of the suggestions contained in the post. This gives followers an idea of what they’re going to see if they click, but not enough to keep them from reading the post.

Emphasize a Call to Action

Calls to action are important parts of most business communication plans. And the same goes for Tweets. If you want people to click a link in your Tweet, visit your site, make a purchase, or take any other kind of action, you can use emojis for emphasis.

The example above shows home décor company One Kings Lane emphasizing a link in a really simple way. The company uses a finger pointing emoji to point straight at the link. This offers a very direct though at the same time playful and whimsical call to action telling customers exactly what to do next. Yet it only takes up one character.

Show Quick Appreciation

It’s important to say “thank you” to customers or followers when they say nice things about your brand or share your content on Twitter. But just saying “thank you” can be repetitive and boring. Emojis allow you to switch up your appreciation messages from time to time. You can use hearts, faces or any number of other combinations to let people know you appreciate them.

In the Tweet shown above, beauty brand Drybar uses a simple yellow heart to send a message of appreciation to a customer who spread the word about the business on Twitter. The yellow color of the emoji even matches the color scheme in the company’s other branding materials. And there are plenty of different colors for other brands to choose from as well.

With all the different emoji characters available, you can even use some of them as part of your Tweet’s message. This can help you save characters but also add just a bit of fun for those followers who might just scroll past all those boring, text-filled Tweets.

For example, the Tweet above from money management app Mint uses emojis to emphasize the words “hide” and “hello.” The company could have gotten that message across without the emojis. But having little pictures in your Tweets can be fun and eye catching, setting your message apart. And that’s the whole point of marketing anyway.

How to Get Started Using Emojis on Twitter

To use emojis in any of the ways above, you’ll first need to know how to add them to your Tweets. If you’re Tweeting from an iPhone, you just need to add the emoji keyboard. To do this, open any app that uses the standard keyboard (Twitter, perhaps?) and click the small button at the bottom left that looks like a sphere. This should give you options for new keyboards to add. Once you select emoji, there should be a smiley face icon at the bottom of your keyboard that you can use to add emoji the same as you would text.

For Android phones, the process can differ based on the type of device. But some do allow you to add on emoji within the Android Keyboard settings.

On a Mac computer, you’ll need to make sure that you have the latest OSX installed. Then you’ll have access to the emoji keyboard. On Twitter, just hit command-control-space to bring up the keyword so you can use it in Tweets.

And on a PC, you can search for the Chromoji plugin on Google Chrome to get access to an emoji keyboard for use in your Tweets.

There are also some hashtags that have emojis appear automatically with them. For example, hashtags surrounding the Super Bowl, TV shows or major news items have had related or custom emojis attached. Right now, you can see a tiny bracket emoji show up after Tweets that include the #MarchMadness hashtag, for example.

Some brands have even paid for custom emojis to appear after specific hashtags. That is reportedly an expensive endeavor, so not one that’s realistic for most small businesses. Still, if there’s a hashtag with an emoji that could be relevant to your business, you could still use it within your Tweets to grab followers’ attention.

source:smallbiztrends.com

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is an organization consisting of professionals and entrepreneurs which focuses on the success of our Members. We help our Members establish lasting relationships and generate new business opportunities towards the growth of their business.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

3 Ways Successful Professionals Build Their Brand on LinkedIn

Discover three simple tips to build out your personal brand on LinkedIn - and generate more business for yourself as a result.

I can still remember my well-meaning grandmother wagging her finger at me and issuing a stern warning: "Self-praise stinks!"

Good thing for Grandma Nemo (may she rest in peace), she wasn't trying to use LinkedIn for business back then.

All joking aside, there can be a fine line between shameless self-promotion and building a powerful, client-attracting personal brand on LinkedIn that helps you generate sales leads, clients and revenue.

And, whether you want to think about it or not, you do have a Personal Brand actively working for (or against) you over on LinkedIn right now.

Here's the good news: If you follow the tips I share in this post, you can quickly emerge with the same type of powerful personal brand that successful professionals are utilizing to create business opportunities and generate real results over on LinkedIn.

Tip 1: Your LinkedIn Summary is Your Biggest Opportunity!

I've talked before about how important it is to make your LinkedIn Summary what I call "client-facing," and in fact you can use this fill-in-the-blank template to ensure your LinkedIn summary section comes across that way.

It's critical, because one of the keys to crafting a killer LinkedIn profile is making it clear who you are, what type of product or service you provide and how it will benefit your ideal client or customer as a result.

We need to make sure the brand of you shines through in this section, and that it does so in a way that potential customers can immediately see how connecting with someone like you can bring value and benefit to them.

Tip 2: Personal vs. Professional - Find the Right Balance!

At the end of the day, no matter how buttoned-up or "professional" your industry is, you still do business with human beings. And, at the end of the day, people want to do business with someone they Know, Trust and Like.

One of the great selling secrets I've learned is that people need a simple way to remember you. Not your product, not your service, but you - the person trying to sell the actual product or service.

Selling, at its core, is relational.

This is where personal sharing comes in. When you share the appropriate amount of personal information and "your story" on LinkedIn, it builds an immediate bond with potential customers and helps them to remember you.

When you do this well, a mental hook and foundation for non-work, non-sales conversation is lodged into their brain, so that the next time you interact, a prospect will remember you're that guy who wants to buy the New York Jets, or loves fly fishing in Colorado or something similar. (And, oh the by the way, you also have product or service XYZ that they might be interested in utilizing.)

Think about how, in the process of a business meeting or encounter at a trade show, you chat up a prospect about his or her life away from work, looking for common interests, passions or themes to bond around. The same principle is at work here.

Tip 3: Be Clear, Consistent and Active!

Above all else, you must have a clear and consistent "personal brand" that you're sharing and reinforcing on LinkedIn.

That means sharing status updates, creating content and offering insights on the network that are consistent with your personal and professional brand - whatever it might be.

Again, don't be afraid to mix in your personality with your business-related content. Have some fun - be human! Share anecdotes or personal stories to illustrate a point or reinforce a concept related to your product or service.

Most important, be active. If you're not sharing and posting content on LinkedIn, you might as well be invisible.

Best of all, if you take advantage of some of the amazing automation tools and software that you can now integrate into your LinkedIn marketing efforts, it won't take you much time at all to accomplish it.

Image Credit: Getty Images
Source:www.inc.com

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is an organization consisting of professionals and entrepreneurs which focuses on the success of our Members. We help our Members establish lasting relationships and generate new business opportunities towards the growth of their business.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

3 Ways to Work Smarter Not Harder on Social Media

In social media, quality will be more important than quantity in the year ahead. Here are three steps to ensuring you're on the right track.

IMAGE: Getty Images

As the tab for social media advertising is expected to hit almost $30 billion in 2016, it is increasingly important to engage with users that will provide the biggest bang for your buck.

With this in mind, SocialRank founder Alex Taub has a few suggestions. In a recent interview with NPR, Taub speaks about managing and ranking followers on social networks. His New York City-based startup allows companies to measure the value of Twitter and Instagram followers based on more than just a number.

Here are three ways he'd suggest recognizing your most bankable followers:

1. Seek active followers.
Followers that frequently reply, like, or share content are more valuable, since they're more engaged--and if they speak positively about the company or brand, even better.

2. Target your engagement. 
Tweet or post customization also increases follower value. SocialRank pulls data from follower profiles including activities, interests, and location that companies can use for more direct marketing or even comparing to competitors' accounts. Through sorting and filtering features, "we basically let you datamine your own audience," Taub explains. Even if you don't use a tool like SocialRank, however, you can customize your own interactions. Facebook, for instance, will allow you to send targeted messages to people within certain geographies. There's also a matter of timing. If your core audience craves your product at certain times of the day--during lunch, for instance--it makes no sense to issue posts at 7a.m. The key is to be smarter about your postings.

3. Identify the best followers. 
SocialRank's Taub also recommends identifying high profile accounts, not just celebrities and other influencers. The number of followers a follower has is important, but you'll need to look for those who engage frequently with your brand or company account. Within this category, however, keep in mind that there is still no standard method to determine the difference in value between followers from different social networks, co-founder of video curation site Tubefilter Drew Baldwin told NPR.


Regardless, it hardly ever hurts to work smarter, not harder.

Source: http://www.inc.com/


ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is an organization consisting of professionals and entrepreneurs which focuses on the success of our Members. We help our Members establish lasting relationships and generate new business opportunities towards the growth of their business.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

Understanding Google+ and Why You Must Get On Board

I can’t tell you how often I hear “I don’t understand Google+ and why it’s so important to use!”  I admit when I first jumped into the social media marketing arena Google+ was a bit of a mystery to me as well. It wasn’t until I started doing the research as the owner of my own social media marketing company, that I realized just how important Google+ was. When I started my research I assumed Facebook and Twitter must be the best to use because they seemed to be the most popular As I got further along in my research, I realized that like in most cases just being the most popular didn’t necessarily mean it was the “best”. I soon realized that Google+ should be up there on the A list when creating a Social Media Strategy. If your goal is to  be recognized, ranked, and increase your SEO (and of course it is!) than you’ll agree with James Thomas, a blogger for Social Media Examiner, who said “Google+ isn’t just another social media platform; it’s a powerful weapon in your SEO arsenal”.Google+, like the other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, use the  hashtags (we used to call the number sign) to allow users to conduct custom searches via specific keywords within the platform itself. However, the thing that makes Google+ a more powerful tool is the fact that it has the world’s largest search engine behind it. Google Search users in the United States and Canada are now able to search hashtags, which pop up as a list of related Google+ posts on the right side of the page. The SEO importance of this feature is undeniable – companies that incorporate hashtags into Google+ posts and match user keyword search results can experience a significant upswing in link clicks and website traffic.

Google+ has branded itself as the social network community for making connections and collaborations within the professional community, particularly in the business and technology spheres. Google+ is the best place to reach a professional audience that ordinarily tends to shy away from Facebook and Twitter.

Google+ has experienced unprecedented growth since its launch in early 2012. Marketing professionals and business owners who ignore its potential and leave its wealth of resources untapped will undoubtedly find themselves falling behind in the ever-changing landscape of social media.  In fact, if your business has 100 followers with active engagement, your Google search engine results position can improve by 14 spots. So, as you can see Google+ is a very important marketing tool to use in promoting your business and it’s really not as scary as you might have thought. So get started today – and feel free to message me if you have any questions along the way. Brennan is a full service social media marketing and strategy company whose main goal is to help you get to the top of the search!    

Statistic Graphics are provided from We are Social! 

ABOUT WNFP Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is an organization consisting of professionals and entrepreneurs which focuses on the success of our Members. We help our Members establish lasting relationships and generate new business opportunities towards the growth of their business.