If you're someone who runs their own business page, a fan page or any other organisation page, you know that having as many followers as possible is the ultimate goal in helping increase the brand identity of your business. Whenever we have a new client joins us here at
eSellution, one of the first things we do is look to ensure their social media pages are fully optimised to provide the best benefit to their ecommerce store.
Whether it's on Facebook or Twitter, there are a number of different things you can do on each platform to give yourself the best chance of gaining as many followers as you possibly can.
Facebook
Customise your page
When you set up a business page for your
ecommerce store, you want to add all the information anyone visiting the page would need as soon as possible. This means placing your business logo as your display picture and adding all other information such as what your business is, how long you have been in business and any other contact information such as URL, telephone number and email address. This information should be added before you starting posting content on your wall or invite people to follow your page.
Invite your friends
The easiest way to get the ball rolling is to ask all of your friends to follow your business page. Once they become a fan of your page, the notification will appear on the news feed of all their friends, allowing them to also see your business and possibly follow you. This is the easiest way to create that initial brand awareness and get as many people as possible becoming aware of your ecommerce store.
Welcome message
Something you can look to do as an added personalised touch for each of your followers, is to send them a thank you message and welcome them to your business page. While this may be more difficult to do the more followers you generate long term, for the initial stages on your social media page, this allows each of your followers to gain a personalised experience on your business page, ensuring they feel valued right from the start.
Vary your content
While you want to post content on your wall on a regular basis, the success of your Facebook page comes in being able to post a variety of content. The great thing about Facebook is that you can post pretty much any content you like. This means you can post regular status updates, links to your website, pictures, videos, articles like I said, pretty much anything you want. The more varied content you post, the more chance you have of not only engaging with your current followers, but enticing new users to follow your page.
Time you post
Although you will get engagement from some of your followers no matter what time during the day you post content, there are statistically times during the day where engagement levels will be higher than others. To optimise your engagement levels, you should look to post your content either on the morning, during lunch hours or during the evening, as these are the times when the higher proportion of users will check their social media accounts.
Open a Facebook store
While having a Facebook store on your page won't drastically increase your sales, it is a great marketing tool to make people on your Facebook business page aware of the products you sell without them actually having to leave the social media site. This works by placing a "My Store" tab on their business page which a user can click on and view your products. If a customer finds a product on your Facebook store that they are interested in, they can choose to their make the purchase through Facebook or visit your external ecommerce or
eBay store to do it. If you have yet to set up a Facebook store, you can get a
Free Facebook store from us today
Twitter
Customise your page
Like Facebook, as soon as you have created your Twitter business page, you need to update all of your information so that anyone visiting your profile knows who you are and what you offer within seconds. On top of that, you should also provide an external link to your business.
Follow as many people as you can
As soon as you have everything set up, you should begin following as many people as possible. However, by this I don't mean simply follow anyone and everyone. As your profile is a business and not a personal account, you should only follow important figures in your field of interest. Following these people will allow more people to become aware of your Twitter page and if you post content that people find interesting, then some of these people will also decide to follow you.
Start Tweeting
Unlike Facebook, there are certain limitations on what you can Tweet. Generally, you should be looking to only post status updates, pictures and external links for people to access. These external links can be to your online store, your latest promotions or any articles you may have produced.
Avoid personalised Tweets
Again, as this isn't a personal Twitter account, no one following your business page wants to know what you are doing, where you are going or what you had for your lunch. Anything you post on your Twitter page should be only aimed at helping improve your business's image and generating sales.
Interact with people
The great thing about Twitter comes in the ease in which you can interact with anyone; friends, family, customers or even leading figures in your industry. This communication is an integral part of not only improving your brand image, but making your business seem more personalised and more of an important figure within your industry. You may even try to reach out to one of these leading figures in order to get them to retweet one of your posts or engage with something you say. Although, due to the amount of people who try to engage with them on a daily basis, you may find that your Tweet receives no response.
Retweet
While it's important to get your own tweets out there, it's also a good idea to retweet other peoples Tweets. This come be done for a number of different reasons; you find something interesting that someone else has posted and you want to share it with your followers or you simply want to give someone a helping hand by making as many people as possible aware of someone's post. The long term success of this is that, when you post content, you may find that some of these individuals decide to return the favour and retweet your content to their followers.
