Social Networking Spotlight on Facebook

Hello all! The 2nd post in my series on Social Networking is on the Facebook Fan Page. Yes, I said Fan Page and not your normal Facebook Page. It's better to seperate Business and Personal life, just in case. I drop my links every now and then into my Personal Page, but that's about it. You never know when one of your 'friends' will say or do something stupid to your FB page and all your customers can see it then. On Facebook, you often have people adding you just for the heck of 'checking up on you' and who knows what will come out of their mouths! haha! You do run the same risk on a Fan Page of course, but this way it's more contained. They won't be able to find you as easy if they don't know the name of your biz.

Do you have one yet? If not, the easiest thing to do, would be to go to mine HERE, scroll to the bottom of the page and above the SHARE link, you will see a link to CREATE A PAGE FOR MY BUSINESS. Click that and you are rolling!

Now for the down and dirty, how has a Facebook Fan Page worked for my business? I only opened up a page at the request of a customer that said she lived on Facebook and wanted someplace where she could see what I was up to shop-wise & share it with her friends, without just having to spam links all the time that no one would click. It made sense, so I started the page. Because I have a personal Facebook Page, it's not always all that easy to keep up with, but I am getting better. It has led to 6 sales since I started it about 8 months ago. These sales are PURELY from the page alone. AFTER I ran an advertisement. I will go into that detail in a bit. In order to know where my sales are coming from, I assign UNIQUE codes for discounts, free gifts, etc. to EACH location I post that code to. That way I know where the sale came from. I do try and upload sneak peaks at upcoming items on my Fanpage, to get people into the shop and not just look at everything from there. I post any information posted about my shop online there to the page as well. (Treasury Features, Blog Features, etc.)

Your Advertising Dollars on Facebook....

are better spent elsewhere. Honestly, it's a HUGE HUGE audience, but how many people look at the ads? I got loads of views and not 1 sale AT ALL. I was lucky enough to run my ad, when I had the 100.00 in free advertising from American Express. With 100.00 in ads, it still resulted in a big fat 0. I then learned that many people have it link to their FAN PAGE, as opposed to their Shop, because if people don't have enough money to shop then and there and don't have an Etsy account, they most likely will NOT remember the shop name. This way, they will always see your updates and return when they have the money. I may or may not run this theory and try again if another promotion comes up. I will definately keep you all posted!!!

Any other sites you would like me to try, please let me know!! I will be discussing Twitter tomorrow!