A lot of people ask me how to make REAL connections on Facebook (and other social media sites). My response is always the same, build your online relationships just as you would build real world relationships. As you know, it takes time to build a solid relationship with someone in the real world, and the same holds true with online relationships. Relationships are usually forged based on mutual respect, similar interests, and connecting personalities. I’m sure that in your offline world, you are polite when interacting with your friends, business contacts, and your family. You should use that same approach when building online relationships on Facebook. Today’s post is all about being polite and respectful when interacting with fans and customers on Facebook.
More times than I care to count, I hear people talking about how important it is to have a large QUANTITY of Facebook fans without much regard to the QUALITY of the relationship with those fans. Many times, engagement is an afterthought. Here at Catalyst Marketers, we believe in Quality over Quantity. Yes, we want to have a large number of fans too, but what we really want is a strong relationship with each and every fan. More times that not, the first interaction we have with a fan is a Thank You message that we send them after they’ve become a fan.
Every time we check the Catalyst Marketers Facebook fan page we check to see if there are any new fans. If we do have a new fan, we take 2 minutes to send that individual a Thank You message. We click on the fan’s profile and then under their profile picture, we select “Send a message” (not everyone allows for messages to be sent, so if you don’t see it, you can’t send that fan a message). We then open a ‘New Facebook Fan Script’ that we have saved as a Text File on the computer, copy/paste the content into the message, customize it (name and anything else that makes sense) for each new fan, ensure the link to our blog is active, and click ‘Send’. It’s that easy and I have to say, we get a great response from it.
The big time-saver is the script that we created. We created it for our first fan, saved out the copy, and now we use it for each new fan. If you want to get even more personal, you can manually craft a new message for each fan, but we think it makes sense to have some standard language that we can add to for each fan. If you’d like, you can use our New Facebook Fan Script as a guide for creating a script that meets your needs.
In your New Facebook Fan Script, you should consider having these main elements:
- Subject line has the words ‘Thank You’ in them to help with open rates
- Add the fan’s first name
- Open with a sentence or two thanking him/her for becoming a Facebook fan
- Set expectations on what the fan can expect to find on your small business Facebook fan page
- Include a call-to-action (ie. take part in discussions, check out our blog, etc)
- Close with your name and a link to your website or blog
If you follow the steps above, and begin to create QUALITY Facebook fan relationships, then you’re going to see an uptick in conversions from Facebook fans to customers. The steps for building a quality online relationship on Facebook are the same steps that you take when building a real world relationship. Being polite, by thanking each new Facebook fan, is a great way start to building a QUALITY relationship with Facebook Fans.
Do you remember using that Emergency Call List when your business was going to have to stay closed on a normal working day? You know, with each new employee you bring on, and for every old employee who leaves, you update that list, print it out, and make sure everyone knows the procedure. Usually it starts at the top with the owner or manager deciding if their store will open on a day where weather or other emergency factors come into play. Once the decision is made, the owner calls the next person in line, then that person is in charge of calling the next person, and so on. 
Before the advent of using online social tools for business, there was really no way of communicating to customers that a store would be closed for the day. Granted, on days like the Philadelphia area had on Saturday, many people aren’t going out shopping in the first place. With that said, what if you’re a doctor’s office or another type of business where customers have an appointment setup on a day that’s in question? Well, you’d have to pay someone to answer the phone and unless you have a redirect system in place, that individual would probably have to go into the office. Obviously, that’s dangerous during bad weather days. Now, all of that has changed due to more and more businesses using online social tools to communicate with customers. A big key to this is also the comfort which customers have in using those same tools to communicate with businesses. 
