Facebook is a great platform to promote your personal brand. As a platform that was generally built as a place to interact with friends and make new ones, it is great ground to display your personal brand. Over the years, changes to Facebook have made it possible to increase your reach through advertising and marketing efforts, which are ways you can utilize to grow your personal brand.
The question then becomes, how do you effectively promote your personal brand on Facebook?
Have well defined goals
In any endeavor, it is vitally important to have clear goals and objectives from the onset. The same can be said for promoting a personal brand on Facebook. Figure out what you want to achieve, whether it’s more conversation, more opportunities to position yourself as a valued expert, or more visits to your website/blog site. Each of these goals has it’s unique metrics, and will dictate what type of promotion tool to use.
Advice for newbies
If you’re new to Facebook and are just starting out, begin with deciding what you want to communicate on your page. I do recommend a business page and here’s why – pages can advertise, they are easily found and rank high in a search for you so they can serve as another place where someone can find you, and you have insight into the demographics of the people who like your page.
Then, create an editorial calendar. Know what quality and valued information you would like to share on your page. Even if your “fan base” is only 100 to 200 people, if they’re an engaged group of people who you want to connect with then they are more than enough.
Deliver content that’s relevant and important to those you want to connect with. [tweet this]
Giving offers
The Facebook Offers feature lets you give offers exclusively to Facebook users. This is a great way to get more people to sign up for your content. You can give away an ebook, report, or cool wallpaper, and in return have people provide their email addresses. For your first offer, target your fans, and if the offer goes well, you can consider increasing the audience.
The power of mobile
Almost half of all Facebook activity is conducted through mobile devices. As a personal brand seeking to take advantage of new trends in online activity, Facebook is your chance to tap into the growing number of mobile content consumers. Craft your profile or business page in a way that makes it appealing to mobile viewers. Craft the information easy to digest, short and make sure your graphics are clear and Facebook will do the rest of the “heavy lifting” in making your page mobile friendly.
Facebook advertising
Facebook has very useful options for advertising and promoting even your personal brand. The platform allows you to promote an event, profile or business page, and even an app. You have the choice of selecting your target market through various parameters, including age, gender, location, preferences, among many others.
Facebook Ads, as it is known, is a powerful feature that no personal brand should ignore. Even though it might cost you to set up, its benefits far outweigh the initial investment.
From dark posts to mirrored audiences to even targeting people who have visited your website, there are many creative and non-salesy ways to be visible.
Images
It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. On Facebook, an image is worth as much, if not more. Status posts and Facebook ads that incorporate images generally tend to have more engagement with followers than those without images. With small real estate to work with on the news feed, an image will stand out from all other text. Thus, it benefits your personal brand to include images in most of your posts and ads.
Simply put, promoting on Facebook is on a completely new level for personal brands to reach people that they may never have connected with. From being able to segment your target audience through various parameters, to creating specialized offers and ads for your fans, you’ll be able to reach a fan base for your personal brand you never thought possible.
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