Facebook marketing for photographers – Part 2 of 3
In part one of Facebook Marketing for Wedding Photographers, we talked about setting up your Facebook page, adding content to the page, inviting both your existing Facebook friends and your past and current clients to join, registering your Facebook vanity url and promoting your Facebook page on your promotional literature, website and blog.
So, once you have got to this stage, how do you continue to increase your number of fans your page has?
Well there are basically two ways. The first is to increase the number of fans you have organically, which we’ll talk about more in this post, and the second is to pay for an ad and use Facebook advertising, which we’ll look in to in more detail in Part 3 – the final post in this series.
Increasing your number of fans organically is without doubt the best way to grow your page for the simple reasons that it will get you in to good social networking habits and best of all, it’s free!
The key to oraganic growth is to encourage your Facebook fans to interact with your page, whether that be writing on your page’s wall, commenting on a photograph or status update or simply ‘liking’ your page’s status updates. The reason for this is that any interaction a particular fan has with your page will show up on their profile page and, more importantly, in the feeds of their friends. This lends itself perfectly to viral marketing.
For example, if you post a wedding photograph on your page and one of your fans (let’s call her Karen) leaves a comment on that photograph, this will appear on Karen’s profile page which in turn Karen’s friends will then see. Once Karen’s friends see this they too may click on the link to your Facebook page and, if they like what they see, will hopefully become a fan of your page too and so and so on! As you can see though, this cycle will only take place if fans interact with your page!
Make sure that you update your page regularly to keep up brand awareness but not too often that fans tire of seeing your notificiations. I find that an update once every 2-3 days is ample.
Remember to make sure that what you post is interesting and positive. Try not to be too formal – social networking is best when you come across as being personable and friendly.
As you want to encourage fans to interact and respond to your updates, why not put questions in your status updates? For example, as a wedding photographer, you may update your Facebook page with “What are you most looking forward to on your wedding day?”
When your fans do leave comments, the important thing is to respond, ideally quite quickly. In my experience the quicker you respond, especially to direct questions, the more people will post and this, again, will increase the fan interaction rate on your page.
Another way of increasing fan interaction is to hold a Facebook competition for fans of your Facebook page. You could do this by asking fans to leave a comment on a particular photograph, with the best comment winning a prize, or encourage fans to post their own photographs to your page with you picking a winner. The more creative the better – just remember that the aim is to get as many of your fans involved as possible!
By following these tips you should hopefully find that the number of fans your Facebook page has will start to increase naturally. Remember though that this is a long term strategy and having fans leave comments on your page, especially those people that you don’t know personally, will take time. Stick at it though and your Facebook page should develop in to a useful and effective marketing tool for your wedding photography business!
Neil
Following your great advice with Part 1 of Facebook Marketing I went and set up my Fan page set up and picked up over 200 fans in the first 7 days. Thanks Neil.
Really useful stuff, thank you. Did you ever get around to Part 3?