Effective Small Business Facebook Updates
Small businesses are setting up Facebook fan pages in droves, but are they using their status updates effectively? Lisa Barone from Small Business Trends posted a great list of tips to improve your Facebook status updates. The list of tips is geared toward getting more interactions from your fans because that is the way Facebook decides which updates to show in your fans’ news feeds.
Her list includes:
- Reduce automation. This is a tough one for many small businesses that are busy running the store. They either stream an RSS feed into their updates or outsource the task to someone who doesn’t write with a personal voice. Lisa’s point is that if you want fans to interact with your updates, they must feel like a real person is speaking to them.
- Ask. A couple of the tips involved asking your fans questions either about current events, your business specifically, or taking a poll. The one I found especially powerful was to ask them to “Like” the update if they agreed with it. Many times if you just ask someone for a favor that is so simple to accomplish, they will gladly do it.
- Contest for comments. Your whole goal is to get more comments on your update, so entice fans to comment, answer a question or choose from a multiple choice answers in exchange for something valuable such as a discount coupon or free report.
Have you found techniques to encourage comments or likes from your fans? I look forward to your comments.
