How to Promote Your Small Business on Facebook Without Being Annoying

Hey, guys, Matt Paulson here. Today I want to record a quick video about using Facebook to promote your small business without being annoying. If you are starting a business, one of the hardest aspects is finding new customers, finding your early customers. When you're just getting started, you don't know what works for advertising. You're not 100% sure who your ideal customers are, and your product might not be fully baked yet. You just know that for your business to succeed, somebody has to buy your stuff. So one of the early marketing things that a lot of people think of is Facebook. You don't have a lot of money, so posting on Facebook is free. So that's where you go. In this video, I'm going to focus exclusively on the more organic side of Facebook. I won't be covering Facebook ads in this video. We can talk about that another time. I'm going to talk about posting on pages and groups and your profile and other people's groups and how to do that well without being annoying. So the kind of default steps that people take to promote their business on Facebook is one, you make a Facebook page, you upload your logo, you type in your description, you start posting, and then you invite all of your friends to like your page. That's totally fine. Go ahead and do that. Some people like your page, some people won't. But you're probably going to find that Facebook doesn't give a lot of coverage to pages. So you're not going to get a lot of business results from your Facebook page and posting on it, because Facebook never shows the post from your page to the people that like it because they want you to pay to reach those people. At the same time, you'll probably post on your own profile, which is also fine because it's yours, and you can post whatever you want in your profile. And all of your friends are already connected with you to your personal profile, so you'll post there as well. Nothing wrong with that. Just don't overdo it because it can get annoying. If you only post about your business every day and don't post about anything else, you can take it to the next level. And there are some right ways to do this and some wrong ways to do this. You can definitely go too far in terms of being annoying or overstepping your bounds or really asking in a way that you haven't earned permission to ask yet. What I've seen a lot, unfortunately, is, is that people will join a bunch of different Facebook groups and start posting about their business without actually participating in that community. Honestly, it's kind of like walking into a crowded room at somebody else's event, handing out a bunch of flyers without contributing, participating, or really being involved with the event in any way. You're really there just to promote your stuff and then you leave. And if your social media strategy is entirely what can I get out of somebody else's community for myself without actually contributing, it's not going to work. We had this issue on the entrepreneurs of Sioux Falls Facebook group pretty recently. There's a new business owner, startup founder, person that kept promoting their. It was a mobile app. They kept promoting their mobile app over and over and over again. They do it like two times a week. First few times I just deleted the post and said hey, don't do that. Kept doing it. So I had to block the guy, unfortunately. But now I see he's doing this in all these other groups and inevitably that's probably not going to be an effective strategy because it's annoyance marketing. You're not providing value, you're just dropping your ads and say hey, buy my stuff. And nobody really likes that. I think that's ultimately a self defeating strategy. I think the other wrong way to promote your business on Facebook is to just start messaging people and asking them to buy your product. I think the multi level marketing organizations tell people to do this because you see a lot of screenshots online of people that are selling. I honestly couldn't even tell you whether it's essential oils or candles or I don't even know what the MLM communities are pushing these days. But you see a lot of screenshots of SMS and Facebook messages of people that are just messaging people to buy stuff and that typically doesn't end very well. Facebook message, SMS and Facebook messenger are really kind of tools for people to talk with their friends and have social conversations. So if somebody is getting a message from you and expecting a friendly social message and then turns out the only reason why you're messaging them is because you want them to buy something, typically people aren't going to respond super well. If you want to set up a sales meeting with somebody, probably don't do it on Facebook Messenger. You're probably just going to annoy the person that you're trying to sell to use a method of business communication. Do it on LinkedIn. I get business asks or requests on LinkedIn and doesn't bother me at all because it's a business social network. Use email. People do business over email totally fine. Or give them a good old fashioned phone call during work week. Nothing Wrong with that either what gets people into trouble is trying to leverage that social relationship or the expectation of a social conversation and use that to turn that into an ask for your business. Usually that's not going to end super well. Don't do that. Really the best way to take your Facebook marketing to the next level is just to have lots of conversations with people and help lots of people with the types of things that you do. So if somebody posts about something related to your industry or your business, have a conversation with them. That doesn't mean you try to sell to them right away. It means you help them and you give them information and you encourage them. You do this over and over and over again and eventually you will have a reputation or a brand around the topic that you're helping people with. This is what made Gary Vaynerchuk so famous. He was the guy that did wine, library, tv, and now he has this hundred million dollar a year social media consulting agency business that I'm not totally sure about it, but it's a massive business. And the way that he built a reputation or brand as an Internet business guru or kind of a sort of social media magnet is that he just had tens of thousands of one on one conversations with people on social media. So for years he responded to every tweet, every direct message, every Facebook message. Anytime you tried to reach him, he personally would get back to you. Took a massive amount of hours for him to do this, but eventually he became that social media sensation and everyone in the business community knew who he was because so many people had a personal interaction with him and he was just so unique in that way that everybody knows who Gary Vaynerchuk is now, at least in the small business entrepreneurship community they do. So I think we could learn something from that. If you want to build a brand for yourself, if you want to promote your business, have lots of conversations that help other people. You can't go into a conversation thinking, my ultimate goal is just to get this person to be my customer, because people will see right through that. Ultimately, your goal has to be, how can I help this person who has a question or is bringing up this discussion topic. That's the heart and the mentality that you need to go into it with. And ultimately by doing that, people will see you as the expert in whatever and then when they need you, they'll come find you. I think one of the best ways to have conversations with people and grow your business on Facebook is to create a community that you are the curator of on Facebook. So I do this with the Entrepreneurs of Sioux Falls Facebook group, and we have about 5,700 local entrepreneurs that chat about business and marketing and entrepreneurship and everything related to that on Facebook on a daily basis. So I created that community a couple years ago. I haven't asked a whole lot of the people in that group, but when I do have something to promote, whether I'm organizing an entrepreneurship event or there's a special one, Roaring Cups I want people to come to, or there's like, even a paid event at Zeel that I want to promote, I never get any pushback for it. And the reason for that is that I provide people so much value through that group, and I've helped so many people through that group. People just don't mind that I periodically ask them to do something. If you help people over and over and over enough, eventually you've created so much social equity that when you ask them for a purchase or you want them to buy something or you want them to sign up for your service, they might just say yes because you've given them so much value and they want to find a way to pay you back. I really do think about anybody can do this. As long as you have a business that targets consumers, you can make your own online community on Facebook in a group that kind of caters to your potential customers. Say, if you're a clothing boutique, you can have a community for women to discuss fashion. If you run the local bike store, you can. If you run the local bike store, you can have a group where bikers get together and ride the trails on Saturday mornings on specific days. Easy thing to do. Maybe you have. Maybe you're Mitch Jackson and you run a local coffee shop. You can have a Facebook group just for people that are regulars of your coffee shop. And that way, people that would normally have conversations at your coffee shop run into each other, could have some of those conversations online when they're not at your coffee shop. There's plenty of ways to do this. You really just need to create a Facebook group that facilitates kind of a conversation around the interest that surrounds your business. You don't necessarily even have to create the group yourself. If there is an existing group, you can just join that group and provide people value in that group without being the curator of that community. Really, the key is just to promote your business well on Facebook. Have lots of conversations with people and conversations that help them first and promote your business second. If you do that with consistency over time and you put the time and energy in that it takes to do it, you'll build that personal brand for yourself and you'll see customers come from that. So hopefully this video is helpful. Hopefully we won't see too many more people that are just going group to group to group and promoting their stuff without contributing in any way. Or the dreaded Facebook message from your friend in middle school that you haven't seen in 20 years that wants to sell you their essential oils but really provide people value. And that's probably the best way to promote your business on Facebook. Provide that value. Create a community. Curate conversation. Create conversation. Help people. By doing those things, you'll develop a brand and people will buy from you. I'll see you in the next video.