Facebook tends to attract people in a personal rather than professional capacity, therefore social or consumer driven marketing has always traditionally worked well. But what about Business to Business? Surely there's no point, it would never work? Here's what happened when we tried it...
I’ve been a big fan of Facebook for a few years now, and instantly saw the advantages for networking, building relationships and targeted advertising. Facebook tends to attract people in a personal rather than professional capacity, therefore social or consumer driven marketing has always traditionally worked well.
But what about Business to Business?
In the past it’s always been rare to see a Business promoting itself on Facebook trying to attract the Business market, or rather should I say; doing it well!
Facebook Groups can work well for shared interests, and this has been hugely successful for promoting my band the Kings of Langley, but what about a Facebook Page?
Facebook Pages can be set up for celebrities, charities, common interests, public figures, just about anything in fact.
Why bother?
For a while now I considered setting up a Facebook Page for FL1 Group, but convinced myself it wouldn’t work and would be a poor use of time.
So what changed my mind?
In short; Facebook changed the way Pages worked, and added more features, better applications that can work on your Pages and added better customisation, so I figured, why not give it a go!
First I set the Page up and linked our blog to it, so as soon as an article was published it got published to our page and the news feed of everyone who likes our page.
Next I set up some pictures of our portfolio which gets updated as soon as our website is updated.
Then I added a custom tab which uses our website’s home page and displays our key offering.
Once this was done, I linked our Facebook page to Twitter, so any updates are automatically Tweeted to our followers.
Last but not least, I invited everyone who might be interested and encouraged them to invite their friends.
Did it work?
For a morning’s work and a little time updating it, we managed to get 104 followers in 3 weeks. Not only that, but we got three referrals in the first week from people who had seen our page and either loved the work they saw on our Portfolio page or wanted a Facebook page just like ours.
Looking back, the key thing I over-looked was about making FL1 Group accessible. It doesn’t matter whether your clients and prospective clients are fans of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo or FourSquare, it’s all about making your brand accessible.
Isn’t that what a “web presence” is after all?
Perhaps the moral of this story is; to anyone saying “Facebook would never work for us!”… don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!
