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For your small business, go for a business card design that isn't merely "pretty".
Small business marketing on Facebook can be hit and miss. A few small businesses are doing great things with Facebook. These are the businesses that generate the amazing success stories which have us all clamouring to catch up on our Facebook marketing efforts. For everyone else, results range from pretty mediocre to spectacularly bad. And maybe businesses are left wondering why their big Facebook push turned out to be a big disappointment.
For the purposes of this article, Facebook marketing refers to your business's page, getting people to fan you, and interacting with Facebook users through the Facebook site or API. Facebook also offers CPC (cost-per-click) advertising on its website; that's not what this article is about.
Here are the top four big mistakes seen in Facebook marketing, assuring that a business's effort will never pay for itself. And if you just responded "but Facebook marketing is free!" there's another one for the list. It's important to remember that all social media marketing has a cost in time and effort that would better be spent on the most profitable possible activities (unless you like working late into the night and barely scraping by).
Build it and they will come might work for middle-of-nowhere baseball fields, but it usually doesn't work for Facebook pages. Most businesses have to work for their traffic by having contests, offering coupons to fans, mentioning Facebook in their storefront, and publishing content they expect their users to pass on to their friends. Getting your traffic will mean embracing some combination of these techniques.
Consider the quality of that traffic, though. People will fan you to win a contest, but they'll promptly unfan you later if they didn't have an interest in your company in the first place. If they don't stay a fan, your marketing messages aren't reaching them, and they're less likely to ever be a customer.
Let's face it. Social media, and Facebook in particular, is really just the online manifestation of good old vanity. It's the driving force that makes those wall postings fly. But it's not your vanity you should be playing to. It's your users.
Every time a user fans you, likes one of your postings or lets your app post to their wall, it's because they like what it says about them. Lisa becomes a fan of Super Raspberry Chocolate Cheesecake because, well, she likes the flavor, and she wants her friends to know that silly (and fun!) detail about her. Robin likes a politically-oriented post about saving the wetlands near her hometown because she wants her friends to know that this is important to her, and should be important to them too. Every time you go to publish on Facebook, consider how you can make the message about your users.
After all that effort to get users paying attention to your small business on Facebook, either by fanning you or seeing one of your posts, you still need to make them a customer (or keep them happy and eager to be a customer again). By all means post once or twice a week (maximum) talking about your new products, specials or just reminding people spring is the best time to beat the summer rush on air conditioner maintenance.
Remember, though, that there's a cost (in users) to posting. Every time you post, depending on what you post and how often you do it, you'll lose a couple users that "hide" you or unfan you. Try to keep that cost down by not posting more than once a week, never posting the exact same thing, and avoiding completely obnoxious messages. And for every purely self-serving marketing message, try to put up a genuinely interesting, useful, or humorous tip, reminder or link related to your business.
Let's say you've had a huge effort to get yourself more fans on Facebook. You've posted signs all over your store, you've pushed it on your emails you send out to existing customers, and you've even printed it on your receipts. It's fair to say most of your Facebook fans know who you are, isn't it? So don't post a message every week explaining your business and calling for people to check you out! Instead, when trying to drive up sales, concentrate on messages that encourage people to come back to your store, or tell their friends about you.
Facebook marketing is not an area where you can put in a lot of work up front, then ignore it. Getting your fan page in order does take some initial work. After that, you need both time and consistent effort to build Facebook into a good marketing channel for you. Whatever you do, don't throw up three contests in the first month, get disappointed with the results, and lose your Facebook login info. Effort over time is what pays off in a big fan base, and once you have those fans, you still need to slowly but surely market to them to improve their value to you as customers.