How to start using Facebook Fan Page for small businesses

Over the past three months, I have been helping some small companies (including start-up businesses) and a non-profit organization in developing their online marketing campaigns, especially for social media marketing stuff... It was really hard at the beginning due to the lack of their online content, fan bases, resources, etc. Also, the challenging part was not using “tactics” but developing “strategy”.

It has become a common sense that it is crucial to produce valuable contents and tell your stories to online users to see successful effects from social media marketing campaigns. But how? How could I start it from “nothing”? That was my question... Also, in the real world, not every business sells “interesting” products or “fun” services…

Here are my two cents on how to start facebook fan pages for small (start-up) businesses, which I have gained from the challenging experience.

The first step of Social media marketing is building social network and connecting with people online. This is why we have seen some “Big” companies organizing and working with their “Brand Ambassadors” to build their social media network quickly and efficiently. Some companies assign some of their “followers” as their brand ambassadors who have shown “strong” loyalties to their brands throughout social media sites such as Facebook Fan Pages (e.g. Levis). The brand ambassadors have engaged in increasing brand awareness online for those companies by spreading words and promoting certain campaigns throughout social media sites.

Then, what about the start-up or small businesses? They should find their own brand ambassadors, too! From where? They are all around you! Your friends, employees (if you have), your personal connections in social media sites, etc. Your friend can be the most valuable brand ambassador who spreads your brand out there for you!!! If you have taken Marketing 101, you are familiar with the term, “Early Adopter”. We have learned that we need to focus marketing efforts on those “Early Adopters” to spread words quickly and generate WOM effects effectively at the beginning marketing stage. In the social media marketing era, those brand ambassadors are “Early Adopters” and you need them in developing successful social media marketing campaigns.

To give you an example about “Brand Ambassador”, let’s assume there is a “B” company that has 10 brand ambassadors and each of the 10 brand ambassadors have 100 “personal” connections (friends) in Facebook. When the company publishes a post on its Facebook Fan page and the brand ambassadors click the “Like” button or “share” the post, the post can have a chance to reach out to 1000 (10 X 100) people through Facebook without any cost. This is partly because of the “News Feeds”, which is one of the Facebook functions. Through the “News Feeds”, whenever one person updates his/her status (e.g. “Like”or “Share” a certain post), most of the people in the person’s Facebook connection can see the updates. This could lead the post to be exposed to the friends of the “10” ambassadors and turn them into “followers”.

Lastly, keep in mind that you need to spend most of your time and efforts in developing online content than asking your friends for some “help”. In the end, the quality and quantity of your online content will be the factors that determine the success of your online marketing campaigns. For this, I would recommend having your company’s own Youtube Channel or blog along with Facebook Fan Page for producing online contents constantly. Having blog articles or video materials in Youtube Channel will definitely help you build your contents on the Facebook Fan page as well and they will enable you to constantly provide special experience to your “followers”.