I’ve been reading The One Thing by Gary Keller and it’s a great book.
This has led me to ponder, what’s the one thing for Facebook success?
So over last few days, I’ve taken some time to analyze what my most successful clients and students have in common when it comes to using their Facebook and Social Media as business-generating tools. Many of them are generating incredible results.
Over the past few months, I’ve written several articles about what it takes to be successful using Facebook and you can read them by clicking the links.
- How To Make Sales from Facebook
- Are You Building a Business or a One Hit Wonder Pt. 1
- Are You Building a Business or a One Hit Wonder Pt. 2
While those articles are chock full of great information they are missing the one most important thing.
What is that one thing you ask?
The owner’s involvement in the process.
The owner needs to be involved in the process. But more than that – it helps if they understand it’s a process and massive results will rarely come with the first campaign efforts. While this can happen, it’s not the norm for an initial campaign.
This is not newspaper, radio, or TV where you pay someone to tell the world about what you have and then you just carry out the delivery of the product.
Facebook is about relationships and when your relationships are stronger, you’ll get better results.
Facebook lets you have a two-way conversation with your prospects and customers. The better you are at it, the more they will support you. Many times we’ve seen customers and Facebook fans come to a business’s support when someone says they had a less than positive experience with the business.
You may think that if you hire someone to do the marketing for you, you no longer have to be involved in the process.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
The owner needs to be willing to listen to suggestions and hear all the reasons for the suggestions. Many times I’ve had to work hard to explain why we want to run a “likes” campaign for a client. While I’m very aware that you can’t take likes to the bank, you can use this as a test of your message, your audience you hope to target with other offers, and to grow endorsements for your business. Consider likes as being akin to customers walking in your door. They’re not buying anything – YET!
When business owners and marketers come together, all options can be explored. This gives the opportunity for the best solution to come out. Many times there are reasons why a strategy won’t work that a new person or marketing company may not be aware of. However, with good communication, a great strategy can be developed.
Many times existing processes need to be edited so that the offers and specials that are being used in other media are communicated to the people managing Facebook. If they’re not made aware, they can’t support the campaigns too.
At times when communication breaks down the people responsible for Facebook work are left wondering what to do. Then others in the business are wondering why an offer didn’t go out on Facebook. Many times it’s because the information wasn’t shared with the people doing the work.
Another topic that everyone needs to be aware of when you’re working on Facebook is that consistency matters. Skipping one day of posting won’t make a lot of difference, but missing a week or more will matter. Your audience will forget you and you’ll have to do more work once you become active again before you will see results. I’m not saying you have to post every day, but you need to post at least 3 times a week.
Not posting organically will also hurt your paid advertising. If people aren’t expecting to see you, and more importantly, looking forward to seeing your posts regularly in their newsfeeds, your results will suffer when you pay to put content there.
And the last item that needs to be understood is the fact that Facebook marketing is a system. To see great results takes more than just running a Facebook ad and watching sales come in for your products.
First, you have to get your ideal prospects attention.
And then get their contact information…
And then give them value so they know you want to help them…
All of this leads to the first sale and many, more after it.
While this takes a little time and effort to set up, it’s not undoable, and the reward far outweigh the initial investments to get it set up.
Now let me be clear. I don’t mean that the owner needs to be posting on Facebook or designing and creating the ads. What I mean is the owner is involved in planning the strategy, then they turn it over to someone else to create and manage, either a staff person or an outside company.
Facebook can be an integral part of your marketing systems, and your business success. All you need is the time and effort put into making it a part of the system. If you neglect your Facebook system you will see your results from Facebook fall as well as handicapping your entire marketing machine.
As you’re building your Facebook sales system you’re creating an asset your business will have to use for a long time. Keep investing in it and you’ll see your results grow as the tools you have to use keep getting better and better and your audiences keep getting larger.
If you would like to know what an entire Success System for Facebook contains, download my free report “11 Tips For Creating The Ultimate Facebook Marketing Machine” by clicking here.
Read it and get started creating your Facebook Marketing Machine.
Have a great week!