As a person who is (hopefully) clearly under 30 I attract people’s unsolicited questions about technology on a frequent basis. This reached a head when a guy on a bench on Jewry Street waved me over, showed me his ringing phone and said ‘how do I answer this?’ From a BID perspective I do very little smart phone education but I get questions from members quite frequently about using social media, ‘what’s the point of Instagram?’ people ask me, ‘does my business need to be on Twitter?’ and ‘how can I tag this on Facebook?’
I suppose I’m lucky that I’m what the jargon-lovers call a ‘digital native’, a person born after 1980 to whom it is entirely obvious how their new phone works, what the new Facebook update means, and how to convert a JPEG to a PDF. So here are some basic tips from me to you about managing a Facebook page.
Getting the basics right
Here are some things that are deeply frustrating as a ‘millenial’ looking at business websites and social media pages:
- Websites that were clearly set up in 2004 and have been dutifully ignored since
- Websites that say ‘welcome to our website’, I don’t know why but it’s infuriating
- Businesses who have a Facebook page and still miss out so much obvious stuff.
Are you an independent shop? Put your opening hours on your Facebook page, if you are closed on Mondays and don’t make that obvious I am going to be pretty annoyed when I want to buy something from you and there is a closed sign on the door.
Get geeky with analytics
The impact of print advertising is frustratingly difficult to measure – happily your Facebook fans have officially signed themselves up as liking you. You might not be able to see who they all are individually, frankly that would be a little creepy, but you can find out how old they tend to be, whether you are particularly popular with men or women and you can see how many people are clicking on what. Look into this information, respond to it, if something is working well do more of it, if something isn’t working well consider doing less of it. Once you know what gets results you can invest in sponsored posts to drive your engagement even further. If you’re anything like the BID team looking at those ‘insights’ graphs will become a real nerdy pleasure.
Keeping on top of things
As a person who has had a Facebook account since their mid-teens it’s not exactly surprising that the On This Day is frequently massively embarrassing for me. As well as showing me exactly how embarrassing I was when I was 17 it also shows off just how much platform has changed in its relatively short life.
Plenty of these changes have had an impact on the way that people interact with Facebook on their personal account but many of these difference also have a direct impact on business pages. Do you sell online? You can integrate your shop with Facebook. Do you run a email newsletter? Stick a call to action to sign up to it on your page.
It’s called SOCIAL media
A Facebook page is not just a place to post pictures of your products with their price. By all means do a bit of that but if that’s all you ever post frankly people will find you annoying. Social media is great for interacting with your customers and with other businesses. Be social with customers – when they comment on your posts reply to them, ask them questions in your general posts get involved with them. Your customers want to feel a connection to your business, it makes them more likely to shop!
