Most companies will own their own Facebook page. It’s generally great to have a huge plethora of followers but when it comes to companies, posts seem very limited in terms of interactions. Today, I’m going to take you through an expansionist plan consisting of two techniques that you can put in motion to increase your social power, build your company in terms of presence and prestige and get you noticed by potential clients.
This technique will be especially useful for all social media companies, however it will also be effective for absolutely any business looking to increase their sales and build local power.
Technique 1: News Pages
Making a news page is the easiest thing in the world, and with the investment of a few hundred pounds, you can have something thoroughly impressive that grows itself over time, and quickly to boot! Having grown several news pages, I can definitely confirm their effectiveness and that they are excellent for networking and picking up new clients.
Step 1: Make the page, adding information, profile pic, cover photo (these two can be local photos.) This is going to be your starting point.
Step 2: Find a reliable local news source, this should ideally be a local paper with information on events and news set in your area. There is always a news source to draw from. This is going to feed you ALL of your content. It’s fast, efficient and free, and you are helping the media share their stories so they won’t be mad at you!
Step 3: Make 20 posts over a week using local news and information on the page. In the background, join every buy, sell and crimewatch group locally on your Facebook profile. The aim with this step is make your page busy, full of information so when people go on it, it’s going to have a history of posting. The groups you join will be your bread and butter for getting your first followers.
Step 4: Start being selective about your content. If there are local crime groups, you post crime information and share the posts to them. Buy and Sell groups, traffic and local events work well. Restaurant posts can be really good. When people interact with your posts, click on the interactions and invite people wherever you can.
Step 5: Keep doing this. In the background if you are serious about growing the page quickly, I’d recommend investing around £200.00 over two months to promote the page to get likes whilst keeping this strategy rolling. Invite everyone, expand your power! You won’t get value from Facebook ads in the same way as you do when you promote something a large audience is interested in unlike most businesses. Trust me, I never advertise for my own business, but I don’t need to because of the social power I have worked to attain.
Over a few months, this News page will grow into a powerhouse. It’s an ideal place to run competitions from (we’ll get into those later!) – This page will gather people naturally and you will find your audience have specific likes and dislikes. There seems to be a macabre interest in crime on every local page I’ve grown. It’s a good place to start but focus a lot on positive content as well, as you don’t want to look like a vampire.
You will be able to grow these pages a lot better than your company because the fact is, people are always interested in news but they are rarely interested in products. Still, now you have a place to promote your products and services. You can set the page to lead back to your website, and you can occasionally do a product or service placement as a sponsored message on the page. You can have your cover photo as your company logo and you will probably get some interest from this. Competitions can be sponsored not only by your company but by people who message you and want to work with you. You should consider: this networking technique with these people, it’ll help you grow your website and local power outside Facebook.
It’s fantastic when people start contacting you and asking you to share a few things for them. I’d recommend sharing them for nothing but you can always charge for the service. (I prefer to not make money off community projects as it makes you look bad.) You can persuade people to offer you free things, rewards for competitions etc so that you both mutually benefit from an increase in power and exposure. Find my template for competitions at the bottom of this article on getting free traffic to your Facebook page.
So what’s the value of this? It allows you to control the local news media for an audience. You can show what you need to when you need to. If your company runs a competition, you control it. If you want to put out posts for your business, you control that, and you can funnel people to your main page from an audience that has come to trust your news page for the news it provides. It’s rare that you will get ANY competition like this from rival businesses owners apart from your local paper, who will love you for the social shares they get. Everyone wins. The public get news, you get customers, the news like you.
Technique 2: Buy and Sell Groups
Buy and Sell groups are extremely common, especially in the UK. They’re little groups where large numbers of people put items up for sale and buy them. They’re large because they have a huge amount of interaction and therefore are popular in the Facebook algorithm. As I mentioned before, you should join all your local ones… But that’s not where it ends.
By making your own Buy and Sell groups, you can start increasing your local power. It’s pretty slow going at the start and it feels like fishing when you’re not using bait. If you’ve made a local news page, you can share your buy and sell groups on it occasionally to get your first couple of followers. Usually after 40 or 50 local followers, the groups pick up. My largest has over 5000 members.
These groups are kind of similar to the news page with the added bonus of the fact they’re always populated with people talking, buying and selling. Therefore you never have to post or worry about growing them particularly much, they grow fine on their own once they reach a certain size. Just make sure you moderate anything that’s untoward, and try and accept people into the groups who are local, within 25 miles if possible. ALWAYS avoid people in other countries as they are not going to buy or sell locally and 99% of the time are spam bots.
You have two main weapons with these groups: You have your cover photo, which can and should contain your business name and logo. (I’d recommend adding this after 200 members.) Then you have your pinned post. The pinned post should indicate that the group is sponsored and run by your company. This can have a backlink to your website on a page that contains information about the buy and sell groups. These will give you exposure. Post to the groups about twice a month with business posts. It’s your right, you might as well exploit it! Also share those news articles into your own groups to grow your news page!
Will these techniques get me business?
As with everything in life, nothing is guaranteed. What you are doing utilising social media in this way is building up an audience, increasing the number of people who know your name and recognise you and giving yourself a larger platform than you may have normally.
It is much better to put out a fantastic deal to an audience of up to 10,000 people than to the 400-800 people that might be following your business page. It’s better at getting you talked about, tagged and recognised, and won’t get you penalised in the same way as sharing your business posts out constantly as many social media ‘experts’ recommend.
With work, time, effort and a little bit of dedication, running community pages can really pay off, not just with acquiring new customers, but also at forging relationships with fellow business people. I have gained some of the highest value results working locally with customers rather than paying for adverts for them. After the initial investments financially, if you keep the posts and work rolling out you won’t have to pay to see the pages and groups grow.
Owning your own groups is valuable because if someone else owns a group and you post there but they don’t like you, that post is gone. If you own the groups, you control the area. You can also stop your competition from posting if you’re a vicious marketer like I can be. Personally, I do like to help other companies and I no longer work locally. But in the past these techniques have served me and the control has been useful to ensure my survival. It has also served the companies I have worked for very well, and opened up a tonne of opportunities for all of us.
My recommendation is that if you want to increase your local standing and give yourself a strong foothold locally, you should invest some serious time and money into this. Even just playing at this with no financial investment you can still gain traction. Use these groups to network and gain local allies. The world is yours for the taking…
As a final thought, if you ever go to business meet up events, having an insane amount of local power will make you infinitely more interesting than someone who has none, and could help you forge a lot of strong friendships.
