Social media platforms like Facebook are a terrific way to build a crowd of followers – but people who become fans of your page are Facebook’s users, not yours. How do you convert Facebook fans into real prospects and customers for your business?
The first thing you’ll need to consider is how you’re going to contact your fans. It used to be so easy – post a video, an image or a link to your website, and Facebook would make sure that all your fans saw it. It doesn’t work that way any more.
These days, Facebook is much more discriminating about the content it shows to its users. At any time, there are around 1500 posts that could be shown to any particular user.
A post on a Facebook page will typically be shown to between 5% and 10% of the page’s followers.
The posts that are actually shown are those which get comments, likes and shares from other users.
Of course, you can make sure that your posts are more widely distributed by paying Facebook to “boost” them.
So there are two options:
1. Write engaging, original posts which people will naturally share, like and comment on, and rely on Facebook to show them to as many people as possible.
2. Write engaging, original posts which people will naturally share, like and comment on, and pay Facebook to show them to as many people as possible.
Once they’re on the page, though, what can you do to turn them into leads, prospects and customers? Here are some ideas:
1. Newsletter Signup Tab
Tabs are a great way to get people to sign up for your newsletter. You’ll need to use an app to create a newsletter signup tab – I use ShortStack, which is free for pages with fewer than 25,000 fans, and fewer than 5,000 views of the campaign per month. (Once you exceed either of these limits, you’ll need to upgrade – but by then your page should be paying for itself!)
How do you create a newsletter? If your website uses WordPress, you can install the MailPoet plugin. This lets you quickly create newsletters from your blog posts – it’ll even do it automatically, if you want. All you’ll need to do is write at least one blog post a week. At the end of each month, pick the top three posts and add them to your newsletter.
2. Offer A Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is something of high perceived value that you give away in return for someone’s contact details. It could be a short guide or report, a video, a cheat sheet, an infographic or a discount coupon. There are dozens of other possibilities – physical books or DVDs, email training courses, you name it.
Once you’ve found or created your lead magnet, you can set up a tab to give it away in exchange for a prospect’s name and email address, or you can set up a landing page on your website to do the same thing. You can ask for more than the prospect’s name and email address – you could conduct a short survey to find out what they’re actually looking for.
3. Use a Call to Action in your posts
Try to include a call to action and a link in most of your posts. If you’re linking to a blog post, Facebook will usually include the Featured Image from the post, as well as the headline and a short excerpt under the image:
You can write a short description with a call to action and a link, which will display above the image:
It’s a good idea to mix it up – use as many of Facebook’s post types as you can.
4. Pay Facebook to Boost your posts
Facebook makes it really easy to pay them to boost your posts – there’s a big button under every post you create. This can work, but it’s usually better to learn how to use Facebook’s advertising platform, which gives you better control over targeting.
If you want to avoid most of the hassle, we offer a streamlined lead generation system which uses Facebook ads to deliver qualified leads directly to your email inbox.
You can find out more about our system here: Qualified Leads For Your Business