The first part of my FaceBook article focused on why you needed a FaceBook page and helped you get set up. Now we need to get into the nitty gritty of things — attracting ‘fans’, understanding what makes it so successful (I call this ‘What Makes it Viral?’), maintaining your page and cross pollination.
Attracting Fans
I wish I could say that now you’ve built your winery’s ‘Page’ it will immediately start attracting tons of fans — but like everything else with social media, this is not the case. Believe it or not, the way to actively market your winery ‘Page’ is by using your FaceBook ‘Profile’ to participate in a few choice user groups and creating relationships with these group’s main ‘influencers’ (the people who have the most ‘Friends’).
As wineries, the most logical place to start is to look for and join wine lover groups. In FaceBook, try running searches using keywords like ‘wine lovers’, ‘wine fans’, ‘loves wine’, maybe even plug in your location, ’sonoma wine lovers’. If you see a lot of ‘Pages’ and ‘Profiles’ mixed in with the groups, then click on the ‘Group’ link to the left and that will remove any results that are NOT groups. Now, start sifting through the results.
The groups I’d pay attention to first are those in your actual geographic location with a decent number of members because most of the members may be close enough to actually visit your winery and attend your events. For example, I ran a search on ‘texas wine lovers’ and here are the results:
With its focus on Texas and 542 members, if I was a Texas winery I would definitely join this group and start following the discussions and posts to their wall — see if there is anything you can add or questions you can answer. If appropriate, add your own discussion or wall post being careful to follow the theme of the other posts — after all, if you immediately start in with a hard sell, it will turn people off.
Once you feel you’ve established yourself as a non-threatening, helpful group participant, start researching who the most influential members are (the ones with the most ‘Friends’) and introduce yourself to them. This is explained in detail by Nick o’Neill in his article How To Win Facebook Fans And Reach Influencers and he also takes you beyond the initial introductions and guides you in how to turn group members into fans.
Initial Outreach – Reach out to network influencers and introduce yourself. Spark up a conversation and explain to them what you are working on. Do not copy and paste messages. If you send the same message to tens or hundreds of individuals, Facebook will mark your account for spam. You need to actually build relationships with these individuals. It’s fine to make small changes to the first messages that you send out but following those initial messages, you want to spend time fostering a positive relationship with the influencers.
Launch Day – After you have built up your list of network influencers set a date for getting those influencers to become fans. On that day, reach out to each of your influencers and tell them to fan your Facebook Page. Depending on how many influencers you have, you may want to consider a phased launch approach. Whichever model you pick, make sure that you do some research and some basic planning.
Keep in mind that some of these are guerilla marketing strategies, not traditional marketing strategies. Would Facebook encourage you to take each of the steps listed above? Probably not but the bottom line is that it works. If you abuse the system, Facebook will surely ban you. Theoretically collecting large amounts of data about network influencers can be a violation of Facebook’s terms of service but it’s also readily available information. Any research you do on Facebook is at your own discretion so make sure not to abuse their system!
Daily Task
Come up with a list of at least 20 influencers that you can reach out to. Begin an initial conversation with each and aim to have them all become fans of your Facebook Page on the same day.
What Makes it Viral?
The ‘viralness’ of FaceBook is what makes it such an effective marketing tool. Once you have gained ‘Friends’ for your ‘Profile’ and ‘Fans’ for your ‘Page’, your updates will appear in their news feeds which will also be visible by all their ‘Friends’ & ‘Fans’ — thereby increasing your visibility to potentially new ‘Friends’ and ‘Fans’ (have I said ‘Friends’ and ‘Fans’ enough? I feel I’ve written this stuff so many times I’m going to wake up with FaceBook nightmares!)
For those of you who like numbers, here are some calculations made by Richard Beaudin in his article Building wine fans on facebook: A moment in time in reference to the top wineries on FaceBook:
Adding up the number of fans for each winery (up to the first 250), there are 37,524 fans for the first 50 wineries, the number jumps to 52,135 fans for the first 100, and finally, 72,742 following the first 250 wineries. Even with some of these fans on multiple pages, these numbers are significant, and I would venture to guess beneficial to the wineries interacting with them. Considering an average 120 connections per fan on facebook, there is a potential today for these wineries to reach in excess of 8 million fans.
Maintenance
To establish an effective FaceBook strategy that attracts followers and furthers your brand, active maintenance and participation must become a part of your everyday business life! You have to keep your ‘Profile’ and ‘Page’ current, post updates on what you are doing, respond to messages and actively participate in the groups you have joined.
Cross Pollination
Now that you’ve put time into your FaceBook account, you need to make sure everyone knows about it! Add a link to your FaceBook ‘Page’ from your website’s home page asking site visitors to become ‘Fans’. To make this even easier, you can have your web designer install a FaceBook ‘Fan Box’ widget on your site that allows people to become your FaceBook Fan right from your home page! To the right is how the ‘Fan Box’ looks on my home page.
In Conclusion . . .
Please know that my two posts on FaceBook have barely scratched the surface of all it can do, but I feel I’ve given you enough information to help you understand how it works and to get you started. Now its just a matter of wading in there and doing it — Good Luck!
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