How Mumpreneurs can use Facebook for their business

Cuddledry are hosting the Business Plus Baby blog carnival today, so in celebration we have written a post about using Facebook to engage with new mums online.

How Mumpreneurs can use Facebook for their business

Its difficult not to have heard of Facebook, and just to prove a point here are the latest facts from the social media leaders themselves:

FACEBOOK FACTS

• More than 500 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

With stats like that it is hard to ignore Facebook as a key tool in your social media strategy. 

It is a tool for connecting with people and as a business you have the opportunity to engage with customers directly and build your online presence.  As a mumpreneur you can harness the power of Facebook to:

• Get found by people looking for your products or services
• Connect and engage with potential customers
• Create a relevant community
• Promote new products, special offers or your blog

 At Everyday Maternity we have had a Page for a while now - we use it to tell our community when things are back in stock, if we have new arrivals or even if we need an opinion on a new product we are considering.  

The first thing you need to do is Create a Page

Pages are your public profiles that users can become a ‘fan’ of and can be created – the only thing you need to invest is your time and effort.   It is worth investing some thought into this, as it is really your shop front – choose photos carefully, make sure you can be found with contact numbers and web address and write a small bio to tell people what you are all about.

Once you have set your Page up, you need to promote it. 

Ideas to do this are:

• Add engaging content – videos, photos, discussion boards.  If you provide interesting items....they will come!
• Update your Newsfeed – if you provide interesting news, the hope is that your fans will ‘Comment’ or ‘Like’ it. This will then appear in their news feed, and be seen by their friends. Try and do something different, pose an amusing question, or ask your fans to interact by posting photos or videos.
• Find some fans – start the ball rolling with your own friends.  You need to send them a request, do this by clicking on the Suggest to Friends link.

The  good news is that Facebook Pages are indexed by the search engines, so do make sure your keywords are included in your company information. This will help you be found.  If you sell breastfeeding clothes in Chester - as we do - then make sure that all those words are in your profile.

Once you have got the hang of everything you can start looking into vanity URLs, Facebook Ads or Applications.