Promoting Shop with Facebook

gavney1

Hi,

I realise there's a thread on FB below.

But I have some specific question wrt using FB to promote our store (a bricks and mortar store)

From what I understand, you can either have a BUSINESS account or a regular account. Which is better. I gather you can't add friends with a Business account - so would it just be better to have a regular account and promote it?

Are there other differences?

thanks

Acoshla

I have a Business Fan Page for my business, instead of a regular account. It has it's pros and cons, but mainly pros.

People only have to "Like" it to become a fan, whereas with a regular account they have to Add as Friend, wait for you to reply and accept, might not seem like much but it still adds another step to the process.

With both your status updates will go straight into their News Feeds so no difference there.

With a regular account you can send messages to people, this means that if they have any enquiries they can email you there which is handy for them. You can't do this on a fan page, which is annoying, because people ask me to private mail them the whole time and I can't, have to ask them to email my hotmail account.

With a regular account people can Suggest Other Friends for you I think, with a Fan Page they used to be able to Suggest to Friends but as I learned today from some of my fans that's not working anymore! They can only Share to their Wall and their friends will see it and hopefully click the link, or they would have to privately mail it which I can't see people doing.

The Fan Page is good because you can operate it from your own account, instead of having two separate log in's to do, and facebook have just recently changed a lot of Business Page settings, so now you can really easily switch between private and business page, and you can now use Facebook as your business page, so it's very handy now for doing sneaky links on other people's pages, for example if my business was ABC and my private page was Spadina, I can now "Like" statuses on people/business pages or leave comments as ABC, whereas before you would have to do it as Spadina and add a link to ABC, which is very obvious shameless plug!

You now get notifications for a Fan Page, which is great because before if someone left a comment on one of my photos asking a question/wanting to place an order and I wouldn't know they were there and might miss them, but now I know as soon as they write it.

Tangled

Absolutely set up a business page.

I'm very reluctant to become 'friends' with a business on facebook unless I know the person behind it well as I'm giving that business access to all my photos etc.

Easier to manage, you can make several people 'admins' if necessary.

With the new pages layout you can use the site as either your business or personal account, commenting on other peoples' statuses etc as either.

Also, FB does have a policy against business holding personal profiles - you may slip under the radar or they may come along one day and shut your profile down (is happening!). Also, on a personal page you can have only 5,000 friends so if you're creeping towards that number you'll have to set up a page anyway, close your personal profile and hope that everyone will follow you.

I manage a few different FB pages, if you need any help shout.

TheCostumeShop.ie: Ronan

Agreed, Definitely a business account. They made some minor changes last week which will have massive impact. Most specifically that when someone likes you it now goes into their time line for others to see and helps the page grow.

In my opinion a personal page for a business looks amateur like. You always run the risk of building up a fan base and then loosing the account for breaching the T&Cs

steve_

Just curious to what was said about not being able to PM people with a business page. Could you for example have ABC as your business page then create lets say tom@ABC as a private page so if people want to PM you they can add you and use this private page?

Tangled

As a consumer I'm not going to sign up to both. You'll have your business email address etc on the info section for people to be able to contact you.

I don't get why it's an issue not to be able to pm, I've never come across a problem with this? And you can send pms as your personal profile, just not as your business page. If someone posts something unsavory on your wall you have full control to delete it.

TheCostumeShop.ie: Ronan

PM isn't necessary and thats why its not there. Businesses don't want to be adding new mail boxes where customers can contact them outside of their CRM programs. If they want to private message you you should have your email displayed. If they want to ask a question you have the wall to post on.

If your dead keen on having a PM page you could write a contact us form into your tabs with a basic bit of coding, but again email is far more professional and preferred.

Acoshla

With regards to the private message thing, I get a lot of people who would say "Can you tell me how much X would be? Private message me please", I don't want to post my prices on a public forum like that for two reasons, my products are individually priced a lot of the time so I need more info before I can quote for it, and I like to keep my pricing private, well I mean not private but not up on facebook for competitors to see and undercut (has happened). It then means I have to add the extra step of telling someone to email me (if there own page doesn't allow messages from non friends), and if they were just casually enquiring this is the point where they could think they can't be bothered going to the effort. People are lazy!

I have my contact details displayed but a lot of people just assume that I can PM so they just ask there.

TheCostumeShop.ie: Ronan

Sounds like a get a quote tab would be even more beneficial to you as it would encourage folks to request a price. Might be worth the investment.

AstonMartin

I will soon be setting up my first page, not having used facebook previously how can i encourage people to 'like' my page? Where on their page will it be visable that they liked my page?

how can i incorporate twitter into the facebook marketing plan?

has anybody directly advertised with facebook to a targeted demographic or are facebook only willing to deal with large scale medium to long term marketing campaigns?

Tangled

AstonMartin wrote: »

I will soon be setting up my first page, not having used facebook previously how can i encourage people to 'like' my page? Where on their page will it be visable that they liked my page?

When someone likes your page it will come up on all their friends' news feeds "Aston Martin now likes XY Page" so if they have a similar interest it'll encourage them to have a look at it too. There is also a 'suggest to friends' button on the page so that you can encourage your own friends to like it, and maybe ask them to do the same.

It'll also show up on the news feeds if people comment or like things on your page so keep the material fresh and interesting to keep people involved with it.

AstonMartin wrote: »

how can i incorporate twitter into the facebook marketing plan?

You can link youri Facebook updates directly to Twitter but I would not encourage this. I don't know what your business is but you may have two different audiences and need to use two different languages for both. You can use Smart Twitter for Pages to link both, by adding #fb to the end of a tweet it automatically sends the message to your facebook page, or you can use something like Hootsuite to manage your facebook and twitter accounts.

AstonMartin wrote: »

has anybody directly advertised with facebook to a targeted demographic or are facebook only willing to deal with large scale medium to long term marketing campaigns?

I haven't but I've chatted to people who have and the reaction is generally positive. It's worth having a look at the advertising section, you can really target your ads - lets say if you want males in your area with a certain age profile and with certain interests, it'll tell you exactly how many people you'll be targetting with the ad, and you can set how much you're willing to spend a day which will determine the frequency of the ad appearing.

gavney1

Thanks guys

Based on your replies, I'll focus on the business page (I have both personal and business already set up).

CheckRaiseIRL

I set up a business page last month.

I am still getting the hang of using facebook.

A couple of questions:


How can I increase the amount of characters I can post at once on my wall?
Is there a way so that I am the only person who can post on my wall?

I want to advertise to .5 million users on facebook that fit my criteria. I have the option of CPM or CPC.

Facebook have a recommended minimum bid for each of these options. Which of these options have you found to be best for your marketing campaign? I was recommended a 0.90 CPC bid by facebook which is obviously a ridiculous price.

What have you bid in relation to what was recommended?

Acoshla

I don't know if you can increase the amount of characters, it's always been 240 as far as I know. You can just post again or leave a comment under the status you just posted?

I think you can change your settings with regards to posting on your wall, you can make it so that people's posts need to be okayed by you before they go on the wall, or you could delete them when people post, can I ask why you don't want people posting on your wall? I thought the whole draw of fb is that it's a great way to be interactive with your customers.