By Chris Swift, AVB Marketing
You’ve heard it many times: Facebook is a revenue driver for business. But you may not understand how to make Facebook work for you. The good news — it’s not complicated.
Becoming Social
Like starting a new exercise routine you need a plan, but ultimately the hardest part is starting. Getting over the hump of not seeing results instantly is tough for most, but the biggest gains happen when you are no longer paying attention to the present and you have dedicated yourself to the journey. And the journey to becoming a social-first company begins with a simple decision: To start.
Why should you start? There are more than 221 million reasons (that’s the number of active U.S. Facebook users, according to Statista.com).
Your community is filled with active Facebook users. Those folks spend more time scrolling through their feed daily than listening to the radio, driving through town or flipping through a magazine or newspaper combined.
The name of the game is attention acquisition, and where the attention is focused is where you need to be.
How to Start
There is no need for fancy equipment or graphic design expertise to get started. All you need is a simple content idea, a mobile phone and 10 minutes a day.
Think of your business as that of publisher, creator or documentarian. With each of those scenarios the job is to produce content. What you produce is up to you. For a quick guide to get your idea machine working, here are the three best-performing types of content on Facebook for businesses:
- Behind the Scenes
- Q&A
- How-to Guides
Remember that Facebook is a visually-driven content platform and that movement in a post is more likely to get a person to stop scrolling and engage with your content. That’s why video content should be your go-to.
Staying Consistent
You have a content strategy, you have the tools, now you need to stay the course and not get distracted by the thought that your social-first approach isn’t working. Remember, focus on the journey, not only the present.
If you are curious about what that journey might look like, consider a three-day-a-week schedule for your content.
Monday: Q&A Monday. Tap your sales staff or your own memory banks. Find the top 10 questions most customers ask while on the showroom floor. Then grab a smartphone and record the answer.
Wednesday: How-to Wednesday. Provide tips on anything from clearing a garbage disposal or the best way to fill a dishwasher to creating the perfect layout in a living room. The idea is to become a trusted resource. You may not sell the exact item(s) your guide is offering help with, but what you are doing is establishing trust and giving value, and hedging toward the future sale by building a community.
Friday: Behind The Scenes. Hop on a delivery truck or hand over the controls to the driver for the day. Interview a sales team member or record yourself sharing a quick anecdote from your business’s history. This is a great chance to really expose your community to who you are as people. And at the end of the day, people buy from people. That’s something the big-box stores can’t do.
Presence means purpose. And your presence is necessary on social media in order to capture and keep the attention of customers in your communities.
Ready for Help
At the end of the day, you may not be able to devote the time, or you may not have a resource in-house, to get your social-first program off the ground. No worries, AVB Marketing has created a new Social Media Package Program with four content levels, giving you the ability to be social first without having to do the work. Check out the details here.
Chris Swift is Director of Digital Strategy for AVB Marketing, a unit of YSN publisher AVB Inc. Contact Chris at chris.swift@avb.net.
