Though best known for the social networking features that allow users to keep in touch with friends, family, and coworkers, Facebook is also a tremendously useful site for green businesses and social enterprises.
Three Reasons Facebook Will Boost Your Company’s Green Marketing Strategy
Three of the most important reasons for green businesses and social enterprises to add Facebook to their social media marketing strategy include the number of users, the amount of time spent on the site, and the cost.
Facebook offers one of the largest audiences of any website in the world. In fact, it ranks second only to Google in popularity, and now has over 500,000,000 users around the globe. Yes, more than half a billion people now have a Facebook account!
Facebook is also remarkable for the amount of time users spend on the site. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes per day on the site, plenty of time for clever marketers to catch their attention.
Finally, Facebook is free to sign up and use, an important point for many small green businesses and social enterprises with limited marketing budgets.
Getting Started with Facebook Marketing
Seventh Generation's Facebook page is a great example of an attractive and effective landing tab.
When planning a Facebook marketing strategy for your green business, there are six main things to think about.
Objective: The first, and most important is your objective. Without clear goals, you will have a difficult time developing a cohesive Facebook marketing strategy.
As a green business or social enterprise, your objective may be to increase traffic to your website, find new customers, establish your green credibility, network with fellow social entrepreneurs or journalists, or even simply raise awareness of your brand or cause. Everything you do on Facebook should work to further that goal.
Design: The design of your Facebook fan or business page should reflect your objective. One of the easiest ways to make an impression on visitors and make them more likely to do what you want them to do is to create a custom lading tab for your Facebook page. The landing page should be optimized to your marketing objective.
For example, if you want to make more sales, you might use the landing page to highlight some of your most popular products or services. If you hope to raise awareness of a cause, your landing page will promote your objective better if it contains news and discussion of the issue you are working on.
Content: Like the design, the content of your Facebook page should reflect the overall objective of your Facebook marketing strategy. In most cases, you should aim to post regularly (but be careful not to overwhelm your fans by posting too often) and to post a mix of original content and content from others.
For example, if your Facebook marketing objective is to increase sales for your green business, you could post a mix of product announcements developed by your own company and positive reviews posted by others. If you’re a social enterprise trying to raise awareness of an issue, on the other hand, you can post a mix of updates from your own activities and news articles or reports from other sources.
Encouraging fans to submit content can also be an effective way both to generate plenty of cool content and to increase fan engagement, but be sure to establish guidelines and boundaries from the start
Promotion: The best content and most effective design in the world will amount to nothing if nobody knows about them. One of the easiest ways to promote your Facebook fan page is simply to share the link. Sharing the link on your official website is an obvious choice, and there are several attractive widgets that you can use to catch visitors’ eyes. Adding a link to the signature of business emails can also be a successful promotion strategy for your Facebook fan page, as can sharing the link on your business cards, advertising materials, and even on signs at your store or office!
Engagement: Once you get potential fans to your Facebook fan page, you need to get them to click the “Like” button and become official fans. Quality content targeted to your Facebook marketing objective is a major part of this, of course, but you also need to keep fans coming back to your page. Posting regularly and mixing up the types of content you post are one way to keep interest high. Depending on your Facebook marketing objective, you may also want to offer interactive content types such as questions and polls. Contests, giveaways, and Facebook-exclusive coupons or other special offers can both engage existing fans and attract new ones. Finally, consider identifying your “super-fans” – fans who comment frequently, attend events, promote your product on their own Facebook pages, and more – and single them out for special attention and rewards. This can help build a healthy sense of community and competition.
Conversion: You’ve put together a Facebook marketing plan based on clear goals, created a great design, filled your fan page with high quality, engaging content, and started spreading the word with smart promotion… now what?
Now it’s time to evaluate your success! One of the most useful tools for determining the conversion rate of your Facebook fan page is Facebook’s built-in fan page analytics: Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights provides a number of useful metrics to help you determine how successful your Facebook marketing strategy is. They include statistical data such as tracking the number of fans and unsubscribed fans, the number of total interactions and interactions per post, the number of page views, and basic demographics for your fans. This information can help you determine what types of content convert best for you, so you can continually improve your Facebook marketing efforts and reach your green business goals!
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