RSS Feed
Twitter
Recently Facebook has been releasing tools created to help small businesses market themselves and promote their fan pages. The Facebook Timeline has been a drastic change that some users love and some users absolutely hate with a passion. Luckily, we here at FSMS believe that the Timeline is an amazing feature and opens a ton of new doors for marketing your small business on Facebook. In this post we will explain the importance of each new feature and how your business can benefit from them!
Promoted Post
This feature was just released about a week or so ago and we have been seeing it used everywhere! It is getting harder and harder to appear in you fans news feeds, and with Promoted Posts you will be able to appear as a promoted story on their news feed. This gives your business the opportunity to reach all of your fans and even the friends of your fans.
On your businesses fan page, you will see a “Promote” button located in the bottom right hand corner of your status box. When you press this button, you are presented with a box displaying how much money you would like to spend to promote your post, and how many people your post should reach depending on the amount of money spent.
If you plan on creating a status for an event, deal/special, or anything important about your business that you would like for everyone to know, you should promote your post! Business owners have been seeing great results from this feature and we believe that the potential is amazing for creating viral posts and truly reaching your fan base.
Pint to Top
The “Pin to Top” feature is an awesome way to show your fans exactly what you want them to see when they enter your fan page. You can find this option located in the “Edit or Remove” section of an existing post. After pressing the button, the status will appear at the top of the page for as long as you’d like, which is another awesome feature for small businesses!
If you are about to hold a special or deal, then you should be sure to pin your post to the top of your page as a call to action! Now you will not have to worry about an important post being lost in the never ending sea of updates on your fan page. Be sure to take advantage of this feature since it can be extremely effective!
Highlight Post
Creating a “Highlighted” Post is exactly what it sounds like! When you create a post and choose to highlight it, your post is then enlarged and spans across both columns of updates on your fan page. All you have to do is press the star located in the top right hand corner of your status box. What we see most businesses doing, is creating an image for an event and highlighting it. This makes the image stand out to your fans and will increase the overall amount of views. If your customers see a post that is larger than the others, we are pretty sure that they will be more apt to view it than all of your other smaller posts. Luckily you do not have any limit on the amount of posts that you can highlight, so you can highlight a series of important posts to make them stand out from the others!
Offers
The “Offers” feature is truly our overall favorite feature that Facebook has recently released! We happen to promote a lot of local businesses such as restaurants and retail stores. This means that we handle a lot of deals and offers for each of the businesses. In the past, we had to install an application on our customers fan pages to create Facebook based coupons. Now we can simply create an offer by clicking the “Offers” button located in the top right hand corner of your status box. Unfortunately not everyone has this feature yet, but Facebook said that they will be rolling it out the feature to more fan pages each day!
You are now able to create a coupon that is displayed directly on your fan page as if it were a status. Business owners are allowed to add a photo, description, expiration date, and terms & services section on their offers. Whenever a fan redeems one, they will be sent an email containing the offer so that they can print and bring it to the businesses physical location. Fans are also allowed to receive the offer one time, which is great for ensuring that some customers are not printing out tons of duplicates. Plus fan page owners are allowed to see how many people have redeemed the coupon so that they can see how effective the offer truly was.
We believe that Facebook is truly starting to understand our marketing needs and really wants’ to help small businesses benefit from their fan pages. Hopefully you have learned a thing of two from our post and be sure to start using these features to get the most out of your businesses page! If you have any other suggestions or marketing tips for the Facebook Timeline, be sure to send us a Tweet to @FrogSolution, or post a tip on our own Facebook Fan Page!
Posted in 
Tags: 
