The Framers Forum

Setting up a Facebook page has been on my "To Do" list for the last of the couple of years, along with getting one of those magnetic signs with my logo on it for the car ...

Can anyone give me any advice on setting up a Facebook page for your business, any "dos & donts" ?
And how did you go about promoting it ?

Thanks in advance
Adam/Bagpuss

Quite easy to set up a small business page on FB. Just register and away you go.
Before you can do anything with it you need so many "likes" so you will have to get friends and family and anyone else you know on FB to go to your page and click the like button.

FB have introduced new guidelines for adverts saying they can only include so much text in pictures so you will need to be creative.
To promote your page you can pay FB so much a day or so much a campaign to have it all over the place or to demographically target your audience.

No point going to facebook now, to late unless you have lots of pounds to spend on getting your posts in front of your likers.

I paid £4 for one day to get a post in front of 1300 people(likers and friends of likers), adding 7 likes.
facebook said I would get in front of at least 3700

Thinking about deleting my account because of out dated posts are worse than no page at all.

A lot of work and money involved.

But magnetic signs they work a treat.
Cost me £70, 2 sides and front and back.
Money well spent.

Framie

I agree with the above post, most of my likes are within the trade , so will not gain any more sales there, I'm going to close most of my accounts that are on FB, I just do not have the time to keep up dated.

Got my magnetic signs off Vista Print when they were doing a silly offer, like FREE Magnetic Signs, just pay for postage. Just remember to take them off every couple of weeks to clean them and the paint work behind them, (my paint work is a bit iffy, forgot to take them off ) also they have faded a bit.

Also not clever to advertise your business name if you go in for a lot of Road Rage / Cutting other People Up

had a half arse facebook page for ages. can't justify the time on it if I'm realistic.
some of these "gurus" promoting social media are really just promoting themselves as gurus and a lot of people have wasted a lot of their time that could have been spent better elsewhere.
if you've got five hours a week, 600 hours a year to spend promoting yourself on facebook (which is what it takes) would it be be time better spent on conventional marketing?
my daughter in law is head of marketing for a firm that does national well known brands.
they come to her wanting "social media" campaigns, are staggered at the real costs, and generally most opt for different marketing/publicity.
Social media marketing isn't for everybody.
If it doesn't suit your business, you don't need it imho.

as for this "getting left behind", you can jump on any time. social media is ephemeral, what difference does it make.
I was tempted by a recent £200 a year offer I had from someone who would tweet once a day and FB once a day and keep the trolls and spammers out, then realised I would still have to supply "content", and time is money after all. Would it even have brought in another £200 a year profit, I doubted it. Just more wasted time.

And honestly, who in their right mind wants to hear from a picture framer once a day, or even once a week? People have lives, you'll just be tweeting/facebooking other framers or people who aren't interested.

If facebook works for you, then thats nice. It isn't the magic bullet that some of these self-proclaimed media experts claim. To be frank, most of them are just regurgitating out of date PLR ebook information from the members side of the warrior forum and don't actually understand it themselves.
Ask them to prove the figures, or proper case studies from a business the size of ours, and they'll all go very quiet and blather on about being "left behind"....

I use facebook for keeping in touch with friends, not to annoy people with marketing messages, I think a lot of people feel that way.

We have a Facebook page and a Twitter account as well. Neither has any benefit in selling in my opinion. We have had one order through Facebook (for a mount) which certainly doesn't make it worth the time.

Like Kev, my Daughter is a Marketing manager and has worked for some of the big names and she says that it isn't worth spending much time on it, although I have been unable to persuade her to take it on as a project, despite her being on maternity leave. She does have the magazine "Marketing Week" which is very enlightening about Social media. According to their surveys, most big names do have social sites but very few reckon it is worth the time. Well over 50% say that the money spent on Social would be better spent on offline ways of marketing.

Most people who follow us on Facebook are existing customers, not new customers. That is why I try and make it amusing and put in stuff that is of leisure interest rather than hard sell. We are going to feature our new pup (Murphy the Boxer) over the next few months to see if that does any good at expanding the followers, but other than my daughters friends, I am not overly optimistic.

The other thing to watch is not to link the Business page to the personal page. Which is what I have done and I cant be arsed to start all over again, especially as I now do not like the new Facebook format.

Of course the other thing is that Facebook attracts the 15 to 30 year olds. Not exactly a Framers target market.

This is great stuff ! Many thanks, there was me thinking I'd missed the boat !
Funny enough I was going to put daily photos of my Schnorkie pup "Buster" on the facebook page, no one will want to see the frame I made that day but they will love a cute puppy

I must admit, I didn't really think it would be a good Marketing tool but just a way of keeping in touch with regular customers ( who like puppy dogs )

Perhaps I'll get the magnetic signs sorted out first, thanks everyone for your thoughts
Adam/Bagpuss

Adam,

Might be worth a read here on the Grumble

http://www.thegrumble.com/showthread.ph ... s-amp-cons

Regards

Keith

As an experiment ( I like to do experiments ) I have set up both a twitter and face book page, I have spoken to our regular photographers and artists and asked them to do the same, I have asked them to tweet and face book stuff when we have done them stuff and I will reciprocate.

We have had some orders already from this, one customer tweeted we helped them out with some printing and did a great job, twit sheffield re tweeted this and put on a map to our shop they have over 100k followers, I think done in the right way this could be big.

I don't know how many times I have login to FB with my laptop, but today it tells me that FB does not recognise the devise I’m using , so when I get into the shop tomorrow and I login in I will close my account , sorry but I’m finding that lately FB is PITA and Carp since it was floated on the stock market

We have had a Facebook page for some time now and have found an increasing benefit as time has gone on. If you connect on fb socially it can be a subtle way of keeping your business in your friends (potential customers) conscience. We only have 150 odd direct likes but find that when people interact on posts you make this opens up your audience exponentially. We have found that since appearing on Facebook our web hits have substantially increased too. I can see benefits of direct paid for advertising on fb, but feel that an active online local presence is a free invitation to enter your potential clients physche.

We shared a cheeky video of a simple box frame job on our Facebook and a couple of enquires resulted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QCcArXKprI

Thinking of doing some time-lapse movies of a footy shirt or hand finishing job. Any ideas for other quirky web marketing?

I agree fully fruitini, our twittering is now become a regular part of our business, we have linked this into our Facebook page so each tweet is displayed there and in turn the Facebook feed is displayed on our website, both twitter and Facebook are being mentioned by customers when we ask where they got us from, business is also coming in indirectly from this, we are tweeting artists work that we have framed or printed and because of this the artists are more actively recomending us.

Tried Facebook it wasn't for us, Better to spend more time on amazon and ebay, You sell more, and get customers. Spend time on your google places intstead

Try amazon, e-bay or Pinterest as well. They seem to be perfect for this purpose.

Try amazon, e-bay or Pinterest as well. They seem to be perfect for this online advertising purpose.

Yeah Pintrest is good way of advertising and showing your products

Social media is a great medium for a business.

But you can't use old marketing techniques with the new media.

The company I work for has various FB Pages and Twitter accounts for its various departments and shops.

If you have a website and social media pages AND paying to promote them then your wasting money.
You never need to pay. That's the genius of these mediums.

I personally use Twitter with the department I head up. I use it as a means to have one to converations with customers.
When I under go starting their shirt I Tweet them through the process, make decisions with the customer on layouts etc.
Not only does the customer feel involved, but it creates a great rapour and they are more likely to recommend us.

The FB page we have for the shop/building i'm in use twitter and facebook for promoting sales and answering questions.
We're very informal on the media to help maintain a relaxed friendly environment.

Bottom line is they only work if you use them.

We have 5 Facebook pages and 5 Twitter accounts all set up.
But only 3 of Facebooks pages are up and running, two of which have settled nicely into their target audience.
As for twitter again we have 3 that run on a regular basis, two of which are settling in nicely.

We've been running them on and off for a year.

Facebook is only as good as the content you supply, having a photo lab provides excellent content. We are constantly scanning old slides and prints and often a really unusual picture crops up (anything from the 60's and 70's is interesting today) and with the customs permission I post these with a suitable comment. The photos will get shared, so we get more likes, not sure if it gets people in the door but our name is out there.

Pro-Am wrote:Facebook is only as good as the content you supply, having a photo lab provides excellent content...

Exactly Right!

You want lively but relevant content, and you want to keep things fresh! Granted, you can leave the garden unattended for a couple of weeks, but you will find a few weeds... Facebook to be effective requires someone posting and interacting on a regular basis....that's why they call it Social Media

However, FB has changed. We used to make a posting and several hundred of our follower (Likers) would see this posting. Now that FB has stock holders, the game has changed. We have about 2,500 Likes today and if I make a posting perhaps 75-130 might see it in the next few days/week (Organically). But if I "promote" the posting or make a right side Advertisment out of the posting this (Paid) promotion will reach perhaps 6-13,000 folks.

If you throw £4.00 for a one day promotion at FB, that's not going to do it, and you will naturally get discouraged. You need to spend a little more over a period of time in a dedicated and planned fashion. Now for those of you thinking that this used to be a FREE way to reach potential customers, you'll have to reconcile yourselves that those days are gone.... that's OK.

FaceBook has replaced radio, television, newspapers and magazines as a place people spend time...and some of those people are potential customers, so if you recognize the value of advertising your business, FB is now one ot those places to do so.

One way of increasing LIKERS (Not just fellow picture framers) is to create a posting about something really unusual or creative that you framed...baby picture / local sports / WWII memorabila....something that is emotional. Then Promote that posting to folks within your County. I mean having a fan from the otherside of the UK or the world is nice...but it does little to do with bringing in business. FB allows you to pick all kinds of parameters on who sees your posting. Honestly I target women 85% of the time due to the simple fact that at the end of the day, it is they that make the Home Decor Buying decisions!

Want some Male likers to your FB Page?....post and promote a really awesome shadow box of a Football Jersey. It works - I posted a framed image of a Green Bay Packers Jersey and added almost 600 fans over a 5 week period... and I'm a Minnesota Vikings fan (which of course I didn't reveal). This is simlar to being a Man United supporter living in Liverpool.

Facebook works.

John

twitter works John and is still free, I posted this the other day, it had 17 retweets which in total went to over 25000 people, we had enquiries within 4 hours and sales within 24.

Our Twitter auto updates our facebook which in turn is fed to our website.