Facebook fan pages can be an extremely useful marketing tool for your local business. The main problem is that too many people use them incorrectly. If your not using fan pages the right way, then it’s not likely your fan page will prove to be very effective for promoting your business.
One important thing you should realize about Facebook is that the typical user does not respond well to direct in-your-face types of aggressive marketing. Someone joins a fan page because they are genuinely interested in the topic, not because they are expecting or want to receive a ton of promotional pitches about your business.
The primary objective to having a fan page is to encourage people to not only join your fanpage but to genuinely pay attention to it as well . In order to successfully accomplish this there must be a motivating purpose. Ideally something viewed as being of interest or reasonable valuable to your fan page visitor, a sort of ethical bribe that actually benefits your visitor and entices or encourages them to join your fan page.
Many people join fan pages for the purposes of leaving feedback and reviews or testimonials about products or services they either really like or really hate. You should make sure that you give them the opportunity to do that, and refrain from censoring posts too much. As a rule Facebook users are generally extremely sensitive to censoring, and will tend to notice if you remove negative posts.
When possible, focus on using your facebook fan page for promotional things like contests, giveaways, discounts and coupons. This will tend to further encourage people to pay more attention to your fan page, as well as give them more reasons to visit your fan page frequently.
You should do everything you can to encourage your fan page users to share your fan page with their friends. This will help you grow your number of facebook fans without having to directly request that people join. People are generally much more likely to join a someone’s facebook fan page if it is recommended by a friend than if they are asked to join by whoever owns the fan page.
Another important element to having a successful facebook fan page is not to neglect it. You should take every opportunity to interact with your fans, it is one of the most important things you can do to help grow your business. Taking the time to answer their questions, post additional interesting links, and generally keeping active can pay huge dividends. People won’t be as likely to visit your facebook fan page if they feel like it has been abandoned, so be sure to stay active and check it for activity regularly, at least several times a week.