How To: Send A Message To Your Facebook Fans’ Inbox

That’s right, a “message.” Not in your fans’ news feeds, but in their inbox!

This is one of the main deciding factors for people when choosing between a Facebook group page or a Fan page for their company/organization.

Some benefits of a group page include the ability to easily message all your group members at once and and the ability to send bulk invites to join the group or for upcoming events (this can now be done on a Fan page as well with a small hack). Whereas on a Fan page, some of the primary benefits include the ability to have a custom vanity URL, add custom HTML code, user analytics (known as Insights), and have better search engine presence since they are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed.

Due to the amount of attention Facebook received on Fan pages, they are slowly working on enhancing the functionality to make them more useful for companies who are looking to promote their businesses. One of these functions is the ability to message all your fans, which is something that was  previously only possible in group pages. Not to mention, it’s sort of hidden, so most people are not even aware of it!

Send a message to your Facebook fans:

Prerequisite: Make sure you are the admin of the page you are trying to send a message out from.

Step 1. Go to your fan page and click the “Edit Page” link under your photo.

Step 2. Look in the right column and under “Promote your page” click the “Send an update” link.

Step 3. Type your subject, message, and hit Send!

Tip: The cool part about sending messages out through your Facebook fan page is that you can actually target them to a very specific audience.

Have any questions? Any tips to share? Leave them in the comments below!

Facebook Hack: Auto-Select Everyone On Your Friends List When Sending Invites

Did you ever want to send an invite to people in your friends list about an upcoming event but didn’t want to spend the time individually clicking on everyone’s name? Or you started a new group or fan page and want your friends to know about it, but you have 3,000 friends in your list and it would take you all day to invite everyone individually? Here’s a small javascript hack that will allow you to select everyone in your friends list within a second.

Go to your event/group/fan page and click “Invite People.” When the box pops up asking you to select which friend to send the invite to, go to your web browser’s address bar, paste the following code, and hit enter:

javascript:fs.select_all();

Voila! All your friends should be selected!

Dead Simple Tip For Increasing Engagement On Facebook

Use tags in your status updates!

Most Facebook users are not aware that they have the ability to tag people, events, and pages/groups in their Facebook status updates. Using tags will display your status update on the pages of those who you mention.

The text highlighted in blue are tags that I used in my status update. In the example above, I tagged an event (Islamic Finance National Tour), people(Farhad and Sameer), and fan pages (Sameer’s Eats and M100Foundation).

My post appeared on the walls of each person/page/event that I tagged. This gives my status update exposure in 6 different places rather than just on my own page. Hence, increasing the chances of others commenting/viewing my post.

To tag someone, simply use the @ symbol and type the name out. For example, if I want to tag John Doe, I would type @John Doe. Same concept applies to a fan page, group, or event.

That’s all!

Understanding Facebook For Your Brand

You may be asking yourself, “My business already has a regular website, so why does it matter if I have or don’t have a Facebook fan page?” The answer is reach. You want your message to reach as many people as possible. To be able to maximize this reach, you need to have a presence where most people are hanging out – and increasingly, they’re hanging out on Facebook.

Take Burger King as an example. They have made headlines over and over again with their innovative and viral social marketing campaigns, most  recently with the “Whopper Sacrifice.” Burger King offered Facebook users a free Whopper coupon if they would “unfriend” 10 of their social network connections. It was a weird, but clever campaign.

There are three parts to the lifecycle of a Facebook fan page:

1) Acquisition

This is the concept that a brand needs to build their audience first, before they can make any use of it. Facebook requires a certain amount of ongoing attention to achieve maximum value, as users expect to see fresh content. Before you go ahead and start suggesting to your friends to become a fan, populate your page with content related to you or you industry. This can be photos, videos, articles, testimonials, press releases, etc. Users will not be interested in your page if they see a blank screen.

2) Engagement

Now that you have the audience that you want, you need to “activate” them somehow – a dead audience is the same as having no audience. The key to success here is communication. You should plan to have someone in your company accountable for updating and continuously participating in the conversations. This shows that you care and acknowledge them. How would you like it if you were trying talking to someone and they were completely ignoring you?

Here are some ways that will help you create a level of activity and loyalty:

• Ask questions that don’t have a “yes” or “no” answer. Doing this will help spark discussions.
• Set up polls. For example, if you own an Ice Cream business, you can set up a poll on Facebook asking your fans what flavor they love the most.
• Syndicate your Twitter and/or Blog feed. Don’t expect your users to leave Facebook and visit your website, Twitter, or some other page. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for them. A good way to do is this by using a Facebook application like RSS Graffiti to automatically syndicate your RSS feed to your Facebook page.

3) Monetization

This is the most difficult part of the Facebook lifecycle. By now, you have hopefully built an active and engaged audience. Even then, do not expect them to automatically become loyal customers. It takes time for your audience to trust you with their money, which is why it is important to constantly stay engaged with them (as we mentioned in point #2).

To be able to effectively monetize really depends on your own business. Here are some ways that have worked for our clients:

• Post videos. Show your fans the “behind-the-scenes.” Record your workplace, employees, customers/clients, etc. Perhaps even give a short background on who you are and how you got started. This forms an instant and trusting connection between you and your audience.
• Offer special deals/discounts. Make promotions that are exclusive to your Facebook fans. If you came out with a new product, post a discount code and thank them for being your supporters. Doing this will also encourage others to become fans of your page as well.
• Facebook Ads. Facebook allows businesses to advertise their pages (or any other web page) within Facebook. These ads are shown to specific Facebook users in various parts of the site. The Facebook ad tool allows you to specify demographics such as age and gender – which is a great way to get a rough sense of how many Facebook users fit your target market.

Conclusion

Sites like Facebook are large enough and growing very quickly. Certainly, they should not be ignored. The social media sites are, in a sense, an extension of a traditional website. Facebook’s viral nature and large user base makes it an ideal marketing platform for many different types of organizations.

Photo Credit: B.J. Morgan / Museum of Making Music
Concept of Facebook Lifecycle: Rahim Fazal, CEO and Co-Founder of Involver