The owners of the School Bakery Café, a bar in Toronto’s Liberty Village neighbourhood, had an idea. The World Cup was coming up – in four days, no less – and they wanted to pack the place. Could social media help?
They turned to Jaime Almond, a social media strategist.
Ms. Almond knew that in just four days, she was unlikely to reach hundreds of individual patrons, so she took a different approach. First, she set up a list of national teams who were likely to go far in the tournament and have a strong local following. Then, she scoured sites like Facebook, looking for fan groups that might be looking for a home base. Sure enough, she found a Facebook group of 800-odd German fans who happened to be in the middle of a public discussion about where to watch the games.
The bar reached out and built a relationship with the group. The fans were receptive. The bar ordered German beer. The German fans showed up in droves and - as fate would have it - the German team made it deep into the tournament.
“There was a line all the way out the door and around the corner,” says Ms. Almond. “Not everyone could get in. It was packed.”
By Ms. Almond’s own admission, it was a stroke of luck. But it’s proof of the serendipitous benefits a small business can reap by marketing on Facebook.
But Facebook can be a double-edged sword for small-business marketers. On one hand, odds are good that your customers are already there: Canadians are among some of the most active Facebook users in the world. The social network offers a much more interactive, engaged experience than a page on the open Web. The payoff, however, is often indirect. Facebook is a private world that plays by its own rules, complete with a byzantine set of limitations.
If you’re living in the Western hemisphere, chances are you’re already one of the 500 million people with a Facebook account, in which case you know that it involves creating a profile for yourself and allowing “friends” to see and interact with your page. But Facebook has grown increasingly commercial in recent years, and it’s added features to match.
Today, businesses or public figures can set up special Facebook pages for themselves called, simply enough, “Pages.” Unlike individual profile pages, which can only be seen by certain people, Pages can be viewed by anyone on Facebook. Significantly, each page is adorned with a prominent “like” button. It does two things at once: first, it lets users signal their support and alerts their friends that they’ve “liked” your business. Second, it acts as a subscription button. Updates to your Page will be instantly delivered to the "updates" section of your fans’ Facebook homepages.
But the power of Facebook for businesses is the same as it is for individuals; it’s not about sales, but interaction. For many, Facebook is less about driving sales than a tool to build a brand for your product or service, gain fans, listen to customers, and gain loyalty.
Katia Millar is a Toronto-based entrepreneur who built Positive Fabulous Women, a women's networking and event-planning business, almost entirely on Facebook. (As the business grew, she has since added an outward-facing website.) Her audience isn’t the stereotypical audience of technology-addled youth, but women aged 35 to 50, who are regular Facebook users. She leveraged the network’s strengths to build a community and reach out to prospective clients with conversations, not sales pitches.
Ms. Millar follows an 80/20 rule: “80 per cent of the engagement is personal fun stuff,” she says. “And 20 per cent is business and events. They don’t want to be sold all the time; they want engagement.”
The result? A 3,567-fans-strong following on Facebook, and sold-out events.
Five things to keep in mind
