So your wondering why you are spending so much time trying to promote your business on Facebook, but your still not seeing any profitable results? It could possibly be because you are simply ‘advertising’ your business to your clients and this is not why people join social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, in fact it might be quite scaring your potentials away. Nobody like to advertised to on social media. They feel like it’s an invasion of their private social time. That is why social media communications require a two-way conversation and is about building strong relationships and networks. It sounds like a lot of work, but is not all that different to a sales assistant in a clothing store building and maintaining a client relationship base. However, without the personal eye contact of a sales assistant it is imperative that the greetings and open-ended questions remain genuine and authentic from your end so as not to deter your potentials clients away from your page.

Asking relative questions is always a good topic starter. For instance, referring to a certain public holiday coming up, or asking what everyone’s favourite day of the week is, and why? These kinds of questions often prompt people to answer, to which you can formulate a response engaging them in conversation.

Or perhaps you are cruising through your fans and wondering how you can get engage them in conversation? Well, way to do that is to comment on interests on their page similar to your own. Perhaps mention how much you like (the topic) also? and refer them to a link that they may find useful. By doing this you are assisting them on a common interest with relevant information. This does not mean that you should backlink on all of your fans pages, but if you have previously engaged with this fan than they will be more appreciative of your information.

Be wise with your forward engagement on fan pages as this strategy can work against you if you over-use it and possibly ‘annoy’ your fans, resulting in ‘unfriending’ (when they unlike your page, or unfollow you on Twitter).

Emotions are important: It is imperative that your social media personality actually has a personality providing humour, emotion and entertainment to your brand. Without this your brand is just a robot reproducing content and links. This will only get you ignored.

If you have a personal Facebook or Twitter page think about the brands that you follow, why you follow them, and why they are interesting to you? More often than not irrelevant content is passed off as SPAM and in the future the brand is often overlooked. Personally the things I find interesting and the links I tend to click on are information sites that produce strong, relevant and easy to understand content. One of the most common phrases with web publishing is ‘Content is King’, and it’s true. If you have strong, valid content for people to read, then they will appreciate your article and hopefully return the favour by linking to your site, or page.

The key thing to remember is that social media is about engaging people in two-way communication with your brand. The effect of this done correctly can result in lifetime preference for your brand or services due to the personal effect of your social media strategy. Think like a fan of any brand and start your strategy from there and you will eventually see results as you build up trusting relationships with people who begin to feel like they already know you and your brand.

If all of this seems like so much hard work for you, you could possibly hire a social media manager to setup and maintain all of the above for you. They can even be your online port of call for customer service with a provided list of FAQ’s from you to respond to customer enquiries. A social media manager will update your status a couple of times daily, reply to comments and inbox messages, engage with your friends/fans, delete your SPAM and provide you with monthly report of activity between your profiles.

Vanessa Kellett | vanessa@vkmediamanagement.com | http://vkmediamanagement.com