Small Business Tactics for Facebook

Facebook is a tried and true social media platform that businesses love to use as it’s very intuitive and requires only a few baseline perquisites, unlike other networks such as Pinterest that can be a little labyrinthine. Though Facebook is relatively a great deal easier to use for your business, many small operations make a grievous mistake of being overly promotional. This projects a distasteful image that can make potential clients shy away.

Don’t forget the purpose of social media; to create content that engages users on a personal level, not sell them product directly. You focus is to grow interest in your brand through social interaction and then direct them to your sales space. In order to do this effectively, there are four basic principles to keep your business on the positive side of consumer opinion.

Build a Killer Facebook profile

If Facebook is reminding you about adding a cover or profile photo, it’s because they are trying to help you improve the visibility of your company. If use the tools at your disposal, you can succeed. If you succeed, you remain a loyal Facebook member. If you do that, Facebook comes out a winner. However, adding a cover or profile photos is just the beginning, and after that initial step it’s time to get the real branding accomplished.

Your page descriptions are significant elements in your Facebook presence - optimizing them for SEO helps to make you visible as well as clearly defined by visitors. Remember that you are allowed just 154 characters for the basic description, and keeping your message tight will encourage more traffic and greater visibility in search results.

Use this section to convey a clear message to your customers about what you do. Keep location details, hours of operations and other details away from the basic description, because there are separate sections for that on your page.

Beyond this primary section, your Facebook settings will determine how well your small business page is optimized. Fill your categories and sub-categories wisely because that’s how your product or service will be found by Facebook users.

Communicate Your Branding

It’s not homogeneity of products and services that help you thrive but your unique qualities and a healthy brand image. If you have been working on standing out from the pack, let your potential customers know how you are different from the rest; be it craftsmanship, business philosophy, lower prices, convenience, better customer support, or selection. Bring this to your Facebook presence and celebrate their superiority.

Build a Rabid Fan Base

Running a paid campaign and having thousands of followers is not the end-all solution for a successful marketing campaign on Facebook. If you traffic isn’t organic and interested in your message, your branding will fall flat. In order to achieve that, you have to be engaging with your customers. The quality of your fan-base matters as they are the ones who determine your lead- conversion ratio. Target users who will are willing to purchase your product or service, share your content and will be rigorously promote your product.

In short, when your followers speak, your responsibility is to respond. Keep the conversation going and help them learn more about you as you learn more about them.

Create Engaging Content

  As with any social media marketing, if you want to succeed with a Facebook branding campaign, you need to create engaging content. This could be excerpts from your latest blog, celebrating promotions within your company, or re-posting current topics that everyone is talking about and sharing how it affects you. Even a simple status update or pictures from your last company picnic can draw people in and promote the very real and personal side of your small business.

Don’t sell, share.

Remember that you can very easily oversell and turn off potential clients. Be subtle and drive your traffic to your product with amazing content that they won’t resist sharing.

For more information about marketing on Facebook or other social media platforms, contact Spotlight Publicity for a free consultation; or, stay tuned for the release of Big Fish, Little Pond, coming via Kindle to your personal device!

How to Find Interns and their Benefit to You

Trying to run a business with a small number of employees and the lowest possible overhead costs is smart, but also can become very hectic and demanding. 

Maybe it’s about time you considered finding an intern. Internships are mutually beneficial programs that can reduce your workload with little to no cost. 

These are wonderful opportunities for both the employer and the student/intern, as both receive benefits from the relationship. As an employer, you provide the unique knowledge and training that will help prepare the intern for a job in the real world via experience, while in return you receive hard work and new ideas from a college undergraduate who is eager to begin working and building their resume.

 
Internships give students the ability to show off what they have learned in school and how they can apply it to real life. Interns have something to prove and are obligated to demonstrate what they are capable of in order to receive proper recommendations for a future job they may be working toward.

Today, an internship is the best way to get one's foot in the door of the workforce, post-graduation. This equates to there never being a shortage of interns as they have more to gain then just professional work experience. Not only do interns learn the ins and outs of the trade, they also are receiving college credits required for graduation, saving them thousands in tuition costs. Even though you aren’t physically paying them, the internship has much more value as a whole.

Interns are not hard to find, you just have to make yourself available. Start by contacting career centers at nearby universities to see if they can add your firm’s name to their list. Then they will recommend students that may be a good fit for your company. According to The National Association of Colleges and Employers, the four most widely considered criteria for recruiting interns at schools are the majors offered, the college's recruiting experience, the quality of the programs and the school's geographic location. However, university career fairs and on-campus recruiting is not necessarily the only way to obtain an intern. Talk to your friends, colleagues and clients to see if they know anyone who is looking for an internship and could use the experience. Chances are, there are a handful of people out there determined to jump on the opportunity.

Internships offer employers insight of the potential value a new employee can bring to the workplace. Since the internship is rather brief, lasting only a couple of months, that time must be fully utilized. 

Think of the internship as an experiment to see if a particular intern is capable and comfortable doing your kind of work for a living. 

The (NACE) notes that “among responding employers, converting students who have taken part in an internship or co-op program into full-time employees is a primary goal for most programs.” Hiring is the goal, and proper training is the way

Use your time with the intern to challenge them. Make them work hard for their credits and give them extra responsibility they aren’t used to. Take full advantage of your intern and allow him to share the load of work. The more you have them do within their range of capabilities that pushes their comfort levels, the more they learn and the more experience they gain to bring with them to the private sector.

 
Keep in mind that the intern is still learning and will likely make their fair share of mistakes. Be sure to check over all the work you have them complete for any spelling or grammar issues or other detail-oriented concerns. It is important to also go over those mistakes with the intern to teach them what mistakes they made, how to fix them and why. This is perhaps the most interactive part of the internship. Although you gain the responsibility of vetting and training someone, you could be taking care of it early on so that later they are strong candidates to be hired full-time by your company - having all of the required experience for an entry-level position.

For more information concerning growing your company or project, please contact us at Spotlight Publicity today.