Or; How to Get More Facebook Fans and Potential Leads Without Being Unethical
I know that title's a doozy, but it certainly explains it all. Where do you find real, engaged, potential client fans? I will answer your (my) question with another question: Who is your ideal client and where would they hang out online? Are they reading
House Beautiful magazine? Do the obsess over Farrow & Ball?
Let's brainstorm some ways you can reach your ideal client. You can run very complex Facebook ads, promote your fan page updates for $5 a pop, launch a Google adwords campaign, buy more fans from some sketchball computer programmer in Malaysia...but those things cost money and (at least for the last option) might not get you fans who actually become paying clients.
I want to give you something that's free, that's easy, and that gets you more high quality fans fast.
Sounds nice, doesn't it?
I typed "Home Design" in Facebook search and found the
Home & Design Magazine had over 4,000 fans. Another search revealed
House Beautiful Magazine which has 118k. Between those two pages alone there are over 200k potential clients interested in beautifying their dwelling who will comment, like, and receive notifications from Facebook. They must be doing something right!
Pablo Picasso is credited with saying, "
Good artists copy, great artists steal."
Tweak that saying to online marketing and you'll have a rough idea of what I'm getting at. You don't have to be the best fan page manager ever to have an effective Facebook campaign. You just have to know where to go for inspiration.
Architectural Digest (70,600 fans) has already done most of the work for an entrepreneur architect. 70,000 potential clients and referrals are hanging out on that page.
How can you get their attention in a way that promotes your firm, but doesn't get you marked as spam?
When you comment to a post on Facebook, it sends a notification to the original poster and those who've commented before you letting them know someone else has joined the fun. This notification is dependent on people's privacy settings - whether or not they allow Facebook to send them notifications.
Take a recent
Farrow & Ball post (16,400): "Colour can be used to alter the shape of a room. A darker colour on the wall will bring it towards you, whereas a lighter shade creates the illusion it's further away." (
view the post) This photo update earned Farrow & Ball 24 shares, 108 likes, and 11 comments. Farrow & Ball is soft-selling their own products, but imagine if someone added to the end of that train, "
We used this technique in a recently completed kitchen & dining room renovation. The homeowners love it! Great tip!"
11 people would recieve notification of that comment and it would live forever on a post that attracted at least 108 likes and 24 shares on a page with over 16k fans.
The people who'll see your comment may click through to your profile and perhaps become fans of your page. That's why I'd like you to comment
as your fan page instead of with your personal profile...so when folks click on your notification, they're taken to your fan page.
CHECKLIST:
- Find & Like a page that has already attracted a large number of your potential clients
- Follow their updates and look for a post with high engagement
- Comment on the end of that chain as your page. Make it helpful & relevant to the original post, like making suggestions or answering questions.
- Find & Like another page and do it all over again...
This is a great way to attract quality fans for a couple of reasons. First, instead of spamming strangers, you'll be posting tips, advice, and sharing relevant feedback with other Facebookers on pages that
already interest them. Second, you're making other fan pages look good by increasing their likes and comments with your own helpful suggestions to their followers!
Share the social networking love with other pages and you'll get some fan notice, too. Seems like a win-win to me. You may only attract a handful of new people at first, but earning 2 or 3 more high quality fans every other day for FREE is better than paying for 200 fake fans all at once.
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