Local Business Marketing Strategy - How To Get Raving Fans On Facebook

Do you remember that movie 'Field of Dreams' with Kevin Costner, where a voice tells him, 'If you build it, they will come?' So, he builds a baseball diamond in a cornfield and eventually the Chicago Black Sox show up. Well, unfortunately it doesn't work quite that way with Facebook. Even if you create an awesome fan page in a popular niche, there's no guarantee that you'll wake up tomorrow morning to find it filled with raving fans. You have to do a little bit more than build it. Let Everybody Know Of course, you've got to put the word out first. Start by telling Facebook friends, Twitter followers, blog readers, your YouTube video watchers, and offline folks as well. If you're not afraid to spend a little money (and come on, for a rocking Facebook fan page you shouldn't be!), you can use Facebook Ads. What's great about Facebook Ads is that you can choose who the ad goes out to. This means you can target the specific folks who are likely to become fans. Your ad can target age, gender, location, language, relationships status, education and interests on their profile. Offer a Freebie or Discount Just like getting folks to sign up to your email newsletter list, you can create a product to give away free. Or give them a discount for your products or services. All they have to do is become a fan and then they get this exclusive deal. Another cool thing you can do on Facebook is run surveys. You can give away a valuable prize to one lucky participant. Surveys and also polls are great because they get some interactivity going, and this makes it fun for your fans. Keep Your Fan Page Active You'll only get fans if you have a fan page where there are things going on. Keep some fresh content going and be sure to post updates on a regular basis. For content, you can automatically feed your blog posts onto your page. You can also use a ping service, widgets, or plugins that'll automatically put your posts or videos on your wall. As far as updates go, they don't need to be anything earth-shattering at all. Just share a link, make a comment or ask a question. If you want to get some activity on your fan page, make your updates interesting, funny, compelling or outrageous. This'll get the comments and likes going. The more activity your Facebook fan page has, the more people will want to become fans. Make It Personal Take the time to welcome all of your new fans. Reply personally to all comments. What this does it that it makes people feel comfortable on your fan page, and then they're more likely to participate, which leads to more fans, etc. It sort of gets the ball rolling. It takes some time, but it's well worth it. Don't Buy Your Friends Just like in regular offline life, it's not cool to buy your friends. There are services that offer to sell you fans. You pay them and the next thing you know, you've got a whole list of fans on your page! But they're not 'raving' fans. In fact, they probably aren't real people at all. It may seem like a good idea to buy fans so that you've got some started – it makes your fan page look less lonely. But when your potential REAL fans see the fake fans, they might disappear. Your fake fans also aren't going to participate on your fan page. In other words, they're useless. The cool thing about this local business marketing strategy is that once you get a certain number of fans, more will keep coming and you can just watch the numbers grow. Maybe a pro baseball team will even show up!