Facebook is the number one social media platform, and a very powerful tool for Network Marketers. Facebook offers many features that help home based business owners find, attract and engage with their ideal customers.
But you have to be mindful that you’re at the mercy of Facebook policies and we have very limited control over our Facebook Profiles and Fan Pages. Facebook is always looking our for their best interest not yours.
Recently, the Facebook Fan Page for Social Media Examiner, which had over 380,000 fans, disappeared for 36 hours; they had no clue what happened, and why the page was removed.
Socail Media Examiner spent a lot of time, money and effort building their fan page and all of a sudden, with th click of a switch, Facebook got rid of their fan page.
They are a pretty a big social media site, and they were able to get their Fan Page back, but just imagine, you may not be able to have that influence and pull to get your fan page back.
Another couple of months ago, I know of another person who lost their Facebook group, had over 12,000 people in the group and they lost the group because competitors basically started to report the group for violations which didn’t occur but they lost their group after spending a lot of time building a membership in that Facebook group to over 12,000 members.
Facebook is great for marketing and prospecting and I think Facebook has even the playing field for home base business owners, network marketers, direct sales business owners, when it comes to being able to recruit advertise at a very affordable price.
Get in front of the audience if you are looking to solve a problem for. When it comes to marketing, Facebook definitely is the place to be.
The Facebook ads give you a lot of reach, give you a lot of in depth targeting, so you can specifically target your ideal customer. Facebook groups are another great tool when it comes to marketing because now you can attract your ideal customers to your Facebook group and nurture them there and build relationships with them there.
When it comes to prospecting, the great thing that Facebook has allowed to do is easily have conversations and prospecting is basically having conversations with people who may have showed interest in your business.
Facebook allows you quickly just engage and have those conversations with people across the world and that is the cool thing about Facebook.
For prospecting and marketing is a great tool but a lot of us as home based business owners live it there. We depend on say our Facebook Fan Page or Facebook Group as our resource to go back to get to our prospects to get to get to our customers, that’s the mistake.
Here’s the solution to it. You have to start collecting, your customers and your prospects contact information, name, telephone number, email. You have to start, especially if you are getting it from Facebook because you don’t know when Facebook is going to decide to close down your Fan Page or to close down your group.
There, as I mentioned the solution is collecting your prospects and customers name, email and phone number, their contact information, there’s a couple of ways to go about doing that.
On your fan pages, there’s a lot of tools out there, email marketing tools that you can use and embed into your fun pages to make it easy for you to collect email and email phone number and names from your prospects or your fans on your fan pages.
The key to that is giving them a reason to subscribe to you, unless giving them a reason to give you their email address and usually that’s an exchange for a coupon, a report that is valuable, a check sheet that can help them with your product and service.
In your Facebook group, you need to do the same thing too. Find a resource that is enticing that your members of your group will want to have and pin it to the top of the group and in exchange for that piece of information they’ll definitely give you their name and phone numbers.
Also if you are getting in contact with a prospect, having a Facebook conversation on instant message here on Facebook, ask them for their contact information, so you could always have their information off of Facebook just in case something goes wrong.
One of the easiest ways to set up a contact form or a form to collect your prospects and your customer’s information is using Google forms.
Google forms are very easy to set and it’s free of charge. I think I’ve shown you a couple of reasons why Facebook is not your friend, I’ve showed you a couple of reasons why Facebook is very powerful for the marketing and the prospecting opportunities that it offer home based business owners and most importantly, we talked a little bit about how important it is for you to capture your customer’s information.
You can have that information where you control it off of Facebook. God forbid that your day come and they shut down your fan page or your group or your personal profile.
