Software Development Management
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Many of us have heard of Facebook and many of us use it to connect with family and friends. But, have you ever considered using Facebook to promote your business?
Facebook is now both the largest and fastest growing social network. With people spending a great deal of time there during their personal time, there is also an increased opportunity to connect with both customers and business contacts.
The biggest concern I have heard from clients/readers is not letting business contacts see all the silly stuff you do with your family and friends. Facebook makes it possible to create different networks of contacts each with different levels of access to your profile. This allows you to create a business network that doesn’t have access to your poke war with your college buddies.
Ok, so how do you tap into this network of potential? One way is through traditional advertising – ads on the side of the page. Facebook contextual targets their ads, so there is a bit of a higher chance they’ll be clicked on. But, as with all advertising, people tend to ignore ads.
If you start thinking a bit more about your customers, you could create a page that highlights your business and automatically imports content from various sources – your website, blog, twitter, etc. The idea here is to provide valuable content for your customers and a means for them to interact with your company (via a discussion). This page could then be promoted through ads on the network.
Also available are groups. You could create one for your customers so they could interact with each other as well as you. These work best if there’s a bit of momentum, so try enlisting some of your customers and business contacts to help you out. You’ll need to lead discussions to get things started – and don’t treat this like a spam list or it’ll have a very negative effect.
Do you use Facebook for business? If so, how?
Technorati Tags: facebook, social netwokrs, social media strategy, social media, business
When was the last time you went to a website looking for some information about a product or service? Did they have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)? Was the information you were looking for actually there? A lot of times FAQs are only marketing driven – trying to cover any doubts a customer may have about purchasing a product. But there is a real opportunity to provide useful information for your customers by providing answers to questions they actually ask frequently.
Obviously listening to your customers is one way to find out what types of questions they may have – and the best way – support and sales people often are a good source within your company. Another source of information is the search functionality on your website (if you have one). What searches are people performing on your website? Those may be the types of questions that are worthwhile to provide answers for (and make easy to find).
If you don’t have search on your website, or don’t have a good way to tell what people are searching for (both I would recommend remedying), take a look at the searches (keywords) that people use to come to your site from outside search engines. This is information that the search engines feel you are good at answering, so it may be a good idea to make sure your answers are well rounded and provide all the information your customers (or potential customers) need.
The best source of FAQs really should be your customers. Provide contact forms and periodically poll your customers (both in-person and online), to make sure you really do have all their frequently asked questions answered. By providing FAQs that your customers actually need, you’ll provide more support information for current customers and more purchasing information for potential customers.
(photo by -bast- @ Flickr CC)
Technorati Tags: faq, content, content strategy, customer service, business