With so much on your plate, it’s seductive to just stop communicating with your fans. Avoid this by rallying the troops to promote your fan club. There’s simply no more effective way to grow a large fanbase.

1.  Start Here: Motivated staff promoting your fan club in-store

• Your staff should be selling your fan club in your business. Period. Motivated staff are 100X more effective than signage alone.
• Staff will be naturally resistant, since this is “marketing”. They can’t sell anything unless they believe in it and know how to do it. So your job is to take the time to continually reinforce the details of your fan club and how it works. Remember that REPEAT CUSTOMERS ARE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
• Make it SIMPLE and CLEAR: Write a 2 sentence script of the key benefits that fans get from your Facebook page and/or fan club.
• Rehearse it, role-play, and monitor with staff until it becomes second nature.
• Explain how customers can like you on Facebook or subscribe to your email/mobile lists.

2.  Designate staff members as Facebook Administrators for your Business Page

• Go to your Facebook Business Page
• Click the Edit Page button in the upper right hand corner
• In the left hand navigation, click Manage Admins
• Type in the email addresses of each person you want to become an Admin

3.  Have staff engage your fans on social media

5.  Have your staff compete for a prize

• Motivate staff to get sign-ups or likes. Ask them to encourage customers to pull out their phones and like your business or add their email to your mailing list. Keep a chalk board where staff can keep tally on the honor system.
• Hold a competition by different store locations if you have more than one location. See how Crazy Dough’s did it.

And for when your staff alone won’t cut it, ring us: 800-335-0520

Here’s six types of promotions you can use to brainstorm your next promotion to grow your revenues.

Specials – Use Specials to avoid excessive price discounting or to highlight new food or inventory. Specials can be tied to specific days, times, or channels, or they can be evergreen. Examples: Tuesday is Deal Day; Monday Wing Night 5-7pm; Free Martini Fridays; Specials All Summer Long; Early Bird Specials; Nighthawk Specials; Weekly or Daily Specials; Chalkboard Specials.

Giveaways, Gifts, and Freebies – Everyone loves free stuff. So give away a prize to the 100^th follower on Facebook or the 500^th subscriber via email. Fans always love the proverbial t-shirt giveaway and that’s free advertising for you; $1 Deals catch peoples’ eyes; And the word “Free” is viewed as the most powerful word in all of marketing, so giveaway a Free pound of fresh pasta if a fan brings friends to your store.

Trivia Contests, Challenges and Scavenger Hunts – You ask customers to perform one or more challenges (in other words, a game of skill) in return for some type of reward. The challenge is typically to gather a list of physical items but can also be simply figuring out a puzzle or finding particular information. Challenges can be performed by individuals or groups and can have one or more winners (first to reply, all who get it right…) Simple example from one of our customers: An online baby gifts store asked her customers to find the birth date of her baby daughter on her website in return for a discount on a shirt for Father’s Day. See www.actbolder.com.

Sweepstakes, Instant Win, and Raffles – In contrast to a contest, sweepstakes are a game of chance. Customers submit a free entry form and one or more prizes are awarded to the random winner. You can giveaway free food for a year, free video rentals, or even free haircuts for a year like recent clients of ours are doing. Sweepstakes help you bulk up your fan list and create excitement. Text message providers even enable winners to be drawn on the spot. Sweepstakes are governed by strict law so you’ll need to write down your Office Rules and follow some process. Of course the original sweepstakes could well be dropping your business card in the restaurant’s fishbowl to win a free lunch; and one of the all-time favorites?  McDonald’s Monopoly game. See www.raffledog.com.

$ Off – Some of the most popular promotions are the simplest to run. $ Off promotions are typically coupon-based so they have the added benefit of providing trackability. Examples: Buy One, Get One; $10 Off with minimum purchase of $40; $1 Off Cup of Tea; $5 Off anything in store; $10 Instant Gift Card. Fanminder makes it a snap reach your customers instantly with a $ or % Off Coupon with Fanminder Offers.

Throw a Sale – A well-constructed sale can often be the most effective tool you have to spur revenues. Try some of these and be sure to limit the sale to a set number of days and times: 7 Days of Xmas; Back to School Sale; Summer Preview 2011; Sandals Sale everything in store up to 50% off; Labor Day Clearance Sale Aug 27-Sept 6; 10% Off Every Tuesday; All Appliances 15% Off; VIP Private Sale.

Don’t forget that you can use Fanminder flexibly for any of the above promotions. Login or Try Us.

Ok, you got this far. Stay with us for just a little bit more, o’ fearless marketer, and ye shall be publishing to Facebook in a jiffy.

<you can always pick up the phone, too: 800-335-0520>

Now publish your first coupon or special to Facebook:

1. When logged in to Fanminder, click the “Grow Fanbase” tab and link your Facebook Business Page to Fanminder.
2. Click “My Profile” in the upper right hand corner of the page, then click “edit” Social Branding. Upload your logo, photo and finish this form to dynamically create your Promo Page that fans will visit.
3. On the Overview tab, click “Send an offer or coupon” in the Quick Links panel on the right hand side of the page. Now create your coupon or special and be sure to send it “via Facebook”.

Go check it out on your Facebook Page’s Wall! It should show up at the same time in your fans’ newsfeeds. You can now publish as many specials or coupons as you’d like and track all clicks, grabs, and redeems.

Unfortunately, the answer is “Both”.

With the Facebook changes baking in, and lots of people weighing in on what it means, I’ll attempt to briefly provide the Pros and Cons. Overall, the changes reflect Facebook’s desire to make Business Pages operate more similarly to Personal Profiles – and that’s a good thing. There’s also more flexibility for app developers and a better way for companies to join conversations across Facebook. On the downside, Facebook just eliminated some tried and true elements of the Business Page, notably the Tabs at the top of the page (moved) and the profile info box (eliminated).

Note: Do not switch over your Facebook Page until the changes are forced into effect on March 10. There are still bugs being worked out by Facebook. You also can’t switch back once you make the switch.

Pros

1. Addition of Photo Strip to top of Page – Photos are now more important for businesses given their increased visibility. This is a big positive as long as you add photos to your Page.
2. Admins of Pages can get notifications by email when people post or comment to your wall. Huge positive.
3. Admins can now surf around Facebook posing as the “Page” or in other words, as the Business. This is a big positive because it means wherever you go on Facebook, you can do all the things that a person can do – like, comment, post, etc on business’ or people’s profiles or Pages as your business.
4. Pages can also feature other Pages now.
5. There is a new Category description placed underneath your company’s name.

Cons

1. Easily the worst aspect of the changes is that your Wall Posts aren’t in chronological order any longer. Facebook uses a secret algorithm to determine which posts show up where. This can cause havoc for you as you search for posts and try to keep track of what people are writing and when, so keep a close eye out for the dates of posts.
2. Tabs are moved from the top of the page to the left side. This will make them much less visible to fans and less clicked on. On the other hand, you can have longer titles.
3. Because of #1, the Profile Pic shouldn’t be too lengthy, vertical-wise, or else your navigation links (formerly: tabs) will get lost below the fold. The profile pic has been reduced from 200 X 600 pixels to 180 X 540 pixels.
4. Company Info box formerly beneath the Profile Pic is now moved to the Info Tab. The info will still be available to the search engines. However, don’t count on any fans seeing this good synopsis of your company any longer.

As you can see, a mixed bag for small businesses.

All the social media “gurus” will have you believe that Facebook and Twitter is for having “relationships” and “conversations” and all the soft stuff they teach you in California (disclaimer: I love California but sometimes my New Yawk attitude suffers here in the land of feel good sunshine.)

So here’s a nice departure for a change: The truth.

Results from an Exact Target study prove that when your fans follow or like you, they’re not looking to gab (only 13% are, actually). Can you guess what they’re looking for? Yes, of course you know, because you’re the business owner not a guru in an ivory tower: They’re looking for deals baby.

Here are the Top 10 Motivations for Consumers to “Like” and Follow a Brand and on Facebook:

1. 40% want to receive discounts and promotions

2. 37% want to show support for the brand/company to thers

3. 36% hope (want) to get free samples, a coupon (a.k.a. freebies)

4. 34% want to stay informed about the activities of the company

5. 33% want to get updates on future products

6. 30% want to get updates and information on future sales

7. 27% like to get fun and entertainment out of it

8. 25% want to get access to exclusive content

9. 22% mentioned they were referred by someone to follow this brand/company

10. 21% want just to learn more about the company

Ok, now that I’ve been obnoxious about this, I’ll end on a conciliatory note and say I too, believe, actually quite strongly, that you shouldn’t bark incessantly about your specials, Deals, coupons, and you, you, you. Just use a little common sense and give people a balanced mix, weighted towards what’s on this list, and we’ll learn to get along nicely.