Friday, June 22, 2012

Creative Ways Your Business Should Use Facebook

For years, Facebook has been a great way to gain business and reach out directly to your clients. While Facebook is still great for those reasons, it may be starting to feel a little stale on your end. People were once interested in what you had to say, and now they simply don't participate as much as they once did.

If you are sticking to the same tactics, it's no wonder your fans are becoming bored. Instead of giving up, try and get a bit more creative with your Facebook antics.

1. Create a game.

Gamification is one of the best ways to get your fans more involved. Creating games that can be played on Facebook entertains your customers and gets them back into frequenting your page on a regular basis. If you use your game to give away prizes, you can easily draw a bigger crowd to your fan page.

When customers are happy, they are more willing to share information with you, talk about it with others, and share links with their friends. Now, your customers are back onto generating traffic to your site.

You can always start the game off small, and then continue to add new games or new levels. This way, you won't end up spending a large sum of money up front, and you will keep your customers entertained by continually adding new reasons for them to come back.

2. Become engaging.

If your customers are no longer reaching out to you through Facebook, or if you've started to notice a drop in comments, it's because you're not providing any engaging items or content on your page. In order for Facebook to work for your business, you have to make sure that your desired staff knows how to use it, and your customers have to know that you have a page.

Then you need to post engaging content. Ask questions. This is a great way to get customers to talk. You could also do a fill-in-the-blank post, asking customers to fill in the blanks to a sentence you wrote. You could even post pictures and ask customers to provide a caption.

3. Use Timeline to your advantage.

Like every other change Facebook has made in its past, everyone dislikes Timeline. Some people find it harder to access information. Others think it's just too complicated. Some think there are too many new rules.

One of these rules has to do with their new cover photo feature. Facebook states that you cannot use your cover photo to show promotions, contact information or lead people to your like button. If you want to promote something on your Facebook page, you have to hope that people find it when scrolling through, but there is actually a trick you can do to ensure it's one of the first things people see.

Slightly below your cover photo are thumbnails. You can easily take content you posted to the site, and choose the "pin to top" feature by hovering over the post. By pinning something to the top, it becomes a thumbnail, making it visible to everyone who visits your page.

So if you're bored with Facebook or irritated with your recent results, opt to promote, be more engaging and create a game. You will then find just how much more traffic your Facebook page will receive.

Minnie Brown is an avid writer.  She is part of an entrepreneur association and likes to give advice to other entrepreneurs.

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