Developing Your Facebook Fan Page Strategy for Your Niche

Transcription

1 Developing Your Facebook Fan Page Strategy for Your Niche TRANSCRIPT With Michele Scism

2 Developing Your Facebook Fan Page Strategy for Your Niche With Michele Scism TRANSCRIPT Anne Cleveland: So I want to welcome everybody to the Total Niche Clarity Virtual Symposium. I m Anne Cleveland. PJ Van Hulle: And I m PJ Van Hulle. Anne Cleveland: And first of all, we actually just want to acknowledge you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to listen into this call because we know how busy you are and everything you do in your business is a choice, and making this choice you get this amazing information today and it s an incredible thing that will definitely put you in the right direction to success. So today we are going to talk about developing your Facebook fan page strategy for your niche, and this is just really an important topic and today you are going to be learning how to use Facebook to drive massive traffic to your site. You are also going to learn the number one reason your ideal clients are ignoring you and how you can change that, and then how to get around the roadblocks that stop people from actually creating a page that works for their niche. So is your fan page pulling its weight in your business? A well designed and maintained page can create a never ending stream of qualified ideal clients in your niche and for your business. 2

3 So unfortunately, so many businesses aren t really using their fan pages to their full potential so we have Michele here to talk with us about all of these things. PJ, would you like to introduce our speaker? PJ Van Hulle: Yes, so our amazing speaker today is the illustrious Michele Scism, and Michele is the founder of DecisiveMinds.com and the founder of the Global Social Media Managers Association. Her clients call her The Results Lady. This is part of why I really enjoy her and I m excited about this call because as a business strategist, she uses her signature take action and get profits system to help entrepreneurs get visibility and then to turn that visibility into profits, and Michele s knowledge in the areas of online marketing and social media marketing have been recognized during interviews on several Web TV shows including being interviewed by Kristi Frank from Donald Trump s The Apprentice as well as multiple talk radio shows and teleclasses including this one, so we are glad that we got her and we are able to interview you. So Michele, let s jump in. We really appreciate that you are here. Michele Scism: I m so glad to be here. PJ Van Hulle: Yeah, and I know that this is a really hot topic right now. So I m curious to know why do you think that Facebook fan pages or business pages as they are also called are so important in order to achieve greater success when it comes to niche marketing? Michele Scism: Awesome, awesome. I m going to give you three different reasons, and they are not just because I said so, but first of all, marketing is changing. If we look at what has been happening, particularly for small business owners, in the past we ve had TV, we ve had print ads, those types of things. Well, that s a one-way conversation, and we as the business owner or the marketer decide what we think our audience needs to hear. We put that out there and hope that that s what hits the trigger and gets them to come to our coaching programs or to walk in our store, whatever the case might be, but with the advent of social medium, social networking, things have 3

4 changed and there is a new possibility out there that really is extremely beneficial for small business owners in particular, and that s what we call relationship marketing. With relationship marketing, it s actually pretty simple. What happens is there are four steps to relationship marketing. There is the get to know you step that there is some form of recognition that you exist or your business exists. Somebody tells them about you or their friend refers or something. There is just that step of getting that first acknowledgement, and then you move them into the like stage, and to move them into the like stage, what I do in particular in my business is I share a lot of information. I am out looking to add value to their life. So on that move, someone starts to actually like me and then they move into the trust stage where they start to trust the relationship that I m not just out there trying to take their money. I m not that sleazy salesperson. I m adding value to their life and improving our relationship and building a relationship with my potential clients, and think about what happens when you start to trust someone. When you trust them, it s so much easier to buy from them, so that s actually what I love about relationship marketing is that people can come in and meet us and start to get to know who we are and move themselves through these stages to the point where they actually show up and they want to give you money, and that happens to me all the time, by the way. I love that part, and that s one reason that social media or why Facebook fan pages, in particular, are an amazing method for moving people through relationship marketing. The second reason that I say that fan pages in particular are so important is, because you know you what, there have been studies done in our customers, our clients, people out there are starting to expect that the people they do business with has a fan page. They are going to Facebook. They are looking for you. There are 770 million people participating on Facebook. So fan pages have become really important and really expected. Then the third thing is that there is not a lot of cost. It s a free platform. It might cost you a little bit if you get somebody to set it up for you if you don t do set it up yourself, 4

5 but we are not talking about a lot of cost here, and it also gives you instant access to a global society, a global economy. I started my business, and I ll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute, but I started my business last January so I ve been in business now for about 18 or 20 months or something like that, and in the first 12 months I had clients in six different countries. Hello, how could I have done that as a small business owner prior to having this easy access to that global economy? So I think fan pages are huge. The possibility is huge, and we just need to get some understanding about what exactly we should do there. Anne Cleveland: Well, I am very curious about how you yourself got involved in social media marketing and its whole world. Michele Scism: Sure, absolutely. I come from a world of business. I was a thirdgeneration entrepreneur so from birth I have worked. Our rule was you couldn t work in the grocery store until you were tall enough to stand on the wooden stool and see over the top of those paper bags because we have paper bags back then. So I was about five years old when I started working, and they paid me with toys. I thought every kid worked. I had no idea this wasn t normal, and so I ve really worked in my entire life. We owned a grocery store and we owned a mobile home park and we started a trucking company and I ended up spending 25 years in the trucking industry. So I ve got a very interesting life when it comes to entrepreneurship, but in 2007 we sold our businesses and I retired and thought, Oh, I m go and live our life at Reilly. I ll travel and do all these things. And about probably nine months after I retired, maybe a little less than that, I ve realized I m spending every day on the couch. I was headed for depression and then I was feeling bad because I was supposed to have everything. My bills were paid. I had money. I didn t have to worry about those things, and here I was in this farm and I thought, You know what, you cannot take an entrepreneur and just shut them down. And that s what I did. I think I lost my identity. So I kept seeing people making money on the internet and I thought, I am going to figure that out. So I decided to jump on the online world, but I actually came in as a business strategist because that s what I do best. I am all about the strategy, and what 5

6 happened was I started taking social media classes and courses to learn how to find my own clients, and it worked. What was so amazing is that social media seems like it can be so overwhelming and so difficult at times if you don t quite understand, but when I really looked at it, I realized it s just a strategy and I started to applying that strategy over and over and over. It worked phenomenally and my new clients kept saying, Michele, tell me what you did. Michele, tell me what you did. Before I knew it, here I am teaching social media training. I ve developed all kinds of programs. I have a virtual day where I teach Facebook and LinkedIn. I have coaching programs. I just have tons of stuff. I love what I m doing. A year ago I would have said, Teaching social media, are you crazy? Who knew? So yeah, this has been absolutely wonderful. I have a live event coming up in two weeks in Orlando where I ll be doing three days of social media training. So yeah, I love it. PJ Van Hulle: And you are in Louisiana, right? Michele Scism: I am. I live in Louisiana. PJ Van Hulle: Okay, I love your story because it shows the power of niching like by really, really diving in and focusing on the social media, you really created a name for yourself and having over 3,000 fans on Facebook in that time and all your speaking events and everything. Michele Scism: Yeah. PJ Van Hulle: It s like you went from just starting your business to being a major player in that niche, so I love that because it s an example of what s possible. So before we go further, could you help us get a better understanding of what social media is? Michele Scism: Sure. Social media is such a huge, huge thing. It covers a wide array of marketing possibilities. So you have social networking sites. That would be your Facebook, LinkedIn type of thing. You have blogging. That s a social media form. You 6

7 have Twitter, that s a mini blogging social media form, it s what they call that. Then you have social photo sites like Flickr or you have video marketing like YouTube, and there are probably 18 different types of social media. So I was actually teaching those in my virtual day one day and one of the participants said, Michele, it s like an umbrella. And I got this beautiful picture in my head of this big umbrella, this social media umbrella with all these pieces underneath, and so it s one of the reasons that we need a strategy to make that work because there are so many different forms of media. Social media is not really about the media. That s one of the problems. We, business owners, come at social media like they have always treated their marketing, and it s different. It s not about the media, it s about being social. It s about building community and it s about having powerful conversations, two-way conversations, with that community so that s kind of my little social media spiel, and listen, before we keep going I just wanted to say really quick that sometimes when I do this talk, I might say Facebook fan page, or I might say Facebook business page, or you might hear somebody just say a Facebook page, those are all names for the exact same thing, so I just want everybody to get on the same page here. That sometimes springs up some confusion. Anne Cleveland: Well, I love your perspective, Michele, because already I feel more calmer about the idea of, Yes, you can do this. There are steps to it. It is just a strategy if you can learn it. And I know you ve been working with entrepreneurs for a while now and I was just curious how your clients get started with their Facebook fan page or their business page. Michele Scism: Absolutely, what I m going to do is give you five quick steps that I start all of my clients with whenever we look at developing their fan page for ultimate results. The first is the naming of your fan page. Now, whether you have a fan page already or you are just getting ready to get started, I just want to give you a little advice here. I ll do this quickly. When you re naming your fan page, it s important to think what are people looking for, and so I ll use mine as an example. When I started my fan page last March, I had been in business for two months at that point, and so 7

8 Decisive Minds is the name of my business, and it was brand, spanking new, and trust me, no one was out there looking for Decisive Minds. So what I did was I included some keywords that I knew people would be looking for on Facebook. Mine is called decisive minds, business success strategies for women business owners or something like that, off the top of my head, but here is the thing, the keywords in there, when somebody looked for business owners, my fan page is going to come up. If they look for success strategies, my fan page is going to come up. So you want to think through what do you want people to find you for. Now, some people come to me and say, But I want to use my name. And if you are someone that people are already looking for, go for it. If I were Oprah, hey, my fan page name will be Oprah. But I was brand, spanking new, and I really had to think through that, and that really helped me be successful. If you ve named your page and you aren t so sure that you have the right name and you want to change it, Facebook does give you that ability as long as you don t have 100 fans. Once you get to that 100 fan mark, then that s a little different, so I just wanted to kind of go over that. We always start by looking at the fan page name. The second part that I think is so important is to have what I call a specialized welcome strategy, and that would be a special page that you can create on Facebook, on your fan page, so when someone comes to your page for the very first time and they haven t hit the Like button yet, this would be where they would be brought to your page, and mine just has an image of my logo and it says, Welcome, we are so excited to have you here on the page. And it tells them what to do. It says, Hit the Like button above. Go down below and get your free copy of my free report, and then head on over to the Wall, introduce yourself and tell us about your business. So the reason that that is important is because it makes it different. All fan pages start to look alike after a while, and you want to be unique. You want to be memorable. You want people to have an experience when they come to your fan page, and so you have the ability to do those. That s one of the things we talk about in my virtual days as a matter of fact. So we will talk a little bit more about that later. 8

9 Then the third thing would be that you are going to create your fan page to build relationships, so you want to be sure that you are on that page, that you are interacting and those types of things, and that kind of comes into the strategy that we are going to talk about in a little bit. You also want to give them some options. If you go to my fan page, which is at you are going to see several things. There is a link to my YouTube videos. There is a page for my free report to sign for that. There is a page that links to my book that I sell. So you want to give them an experience that s a little different. Then also the fourth thing would be to be thinking about what are you going to use to drive traffic to your fan page. One of the things is to get what Facebook calls a vanity URL or unique URL for your fan page. If you notice, when you get a fan page, the URL for it is a hundred characters long and you don t want to be sharing that. You want to shorten that name like mine, for example, with the Decisive Minds on the end. Once you get to 25 fans, you can do that through Facebook, and then also you want to look at your fan page as something that drives traffic to your website, and so if you will notice, I have two different places where my opt-in box is for my free report. I have it on my welcome page and then I have a separate page for it all by itself, and you have the ability to add Google Analytics. So because I have that, I know that I m driving a lot of traffic onto my list, creating that list which in turn gives me the ability to continue the conversation with them to move them to my website, to talk more to them from my blog, or those types of things. So I think that s extremely important. The fifth thing we focus on is developing and implementing that fan page strategy and we are going to talk a little bit more about that further down the call, so I m going to save that one if you don t mind. PJ Van Hulle: Yeah, actually, we have a question on the blog. Emily said, It would be helpful if you could clarify the level of information we will be covering. She said, So far it sounds like this is for people who haven t delved too far into the social media world 9

10 and she thought it would be a more advanced call, so who is the appropriate audience for this call. Michele Scism: Right. PJ Van Hulle: I think I don t hear many people talking about the strategy the way you ve broken it down. Michele Scism: Yeah, yeah, I would say PJ Van Hulle: But you know more about what you are going to talk about. Michele Scism: So yeah, and we are getting ready to go deeper, but I like to start with that how to get started part because so many people need that, but we are going to go into how do you add friends and just different things like that. So we are going to get into some deeper strategy for those who already have fan pages. PJ Van Hulle: Cool. So then if people were to just get started with their fan page today, what changes could they see in their business in the next 30 days, 90 days, or one year or like that? Michele Scism: Sure, absolutely. I can tell you from my experience what happened. In the first 30 days, actually, I added a little over a thousand fans to my fan page in the first 30 days and that really brought me some visibility and I started to see some real connections. I was building that relationship and being able to talk to more people and getting that audience, which is our initial goal for our fan pages. It s to start getting the visibility and making on a whole money, and then about 90 days in was when I think that point where I started to become the expert in people s eyes because I was sharing good information. I was moving them through that know, like, trust stage in the relationship marketing and really getting credibility, and I noticed that about that time was when I started being asked to speak on different teleseminars and things from people who found me because of my fan page. It was really cool. 10

11 Then one year in, hello, my fan page is rocking and I ve really built a good, solid list that is marketing very well and it makes me really good money. The third part about being a year in, and this is what s so exciting is that now it s kind of on automatic pilot. All the strategies are set in place and all the plans and the whole system is there and it s set and it s done. It doesn t take me near as much time as it did in the beginning, and it works very well so it s worth the spending the time to get started. Anne Cleveland: Excellent. I m wondering, do you normally, as you are working with your clients, see specific roadblocks that prevent your clients from just getting started and getting into this whole Facebook thing? Michele Scism: Yeah, I really do. I see a couple of things specifically. Number one, I think the fear of doing something wrong. It s such a new thing with these fan pages being only three or four years old at this point, and so it s so new that a lot of people get really afraid and just don t move forward. But you know what, we can t sit there. We have to move forward. We have to do these things because our clients are expecting them. A couple other things real quick there, maybe they don t know how to get started and I just gave them some really good steps on how to get started, and then the third thing which is what I really want to focus the rest of the call on is, okay, so I have a fan page. I ve set up this fan page. Now, what do I do? Those are the three roadblocks where I find people. I find them either frozen in fear, or just not knowing what to do, and then not knowing what to do next. So yeah, it happens. PJ Van Hulle: Okay, so then are there any specific strategies you share with us to navigate around those roadblocks and become successful with the fan pages? Michele Scism: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I would say that we need to understand that it s okay that you are not sure how to do or what to do or where to go. Once we acknowledge that in ourselves, there was a day when we didn t know how to use our 11

12 BlackBerrys and we had to learn how to use our BlackBerrys, or when we were kids we had to learn how to walk. These things are new, and yes, they are changing and we can learn these lessons and move forward. So I think that that s really important. The second thing would be that it s something that s very easily outsourced. So if you really feel like you don t want to set your fan page and you want someone else to do it, there are people out there, the social media managers, that they can set up your fan pages for you. They can help you develop a strategy. If you don t want to do the strategy, they can implement the strategy for you. There is a lot of help out there. It s one of the things we do. One of the reasons I set up the Global Social Media Managers Association is because I have so many business owners coming to me and saying, Michele, help me find someone to do this for me. So that s one of the goals of the GSMMA is to have a place where business owners can go and find that help. But I really prefer and I like to see people just set up a strategy and get out there and do it themselves. So talking about fan page strategy in particular, there are three steps I think to a really good and successful fan page strategy, and the first one is all about getting connected. How do you add fans to your fan page? What I ll do is share with you what I did that has been very successful. I still do it to this day just like I did in the beginning, and the first thing I do is I actually add personal friends to my personal profile on Facebook. I don t know about you guys, but if Facebook allows you to have 5,000 personal friends, friends and family. Well, I don t have that many friends and families so I took that to mean that they wanted me to create a network of friends and family, so it s best in my personal goal and I m out looking to connect with three particular groups of people. The first group would be my potential clients, my current clients and my past clients, and so on Facebook, since we are talking about niching and we are talking about our ideal clients, we are learning who those people are and we know who those people are at this point, and so for me, in particular, it would be business owners, it would be work at home moms, the solopreneurs, those types of people. That s who I like to connect 12

13 with. That s one group of people that I like to connect with, so I do that through my personal profile. I find those people. Maybe they attend events. That s one thing I know about my clients is they like to attend events just like this one, this teleseminar or live events, and so one way that I find people on Facebook is to actually go to events that are listed on Facebook. So maybe I would have found one of the great Total Niche Clarity events that were out there, and I would have looked at the list of people who said that they were signed up or that they wanted to attend the event because Facebook showed me that on the Events page. From there you can look at their profile. If they fit in your ideal client or your potential client or whatever, you can send them a message to request that they be added as your friend. I would do something like I would always add a personal message and it might say, I see you re going to be on the call for Total Niche Clarity and so am I. I m so excited about it. I love to connect with like-minded people. Can we connect? And I would say 98% of the time those connections go through. So that s one group of people that I m looking for. The second group of people that I m looking for are my potential joint venture partners or colleagues, people who might maybe do a call with me like this and interviewing me for a call, or maybe there is a product I want to develop and I m looking for somebody to develop it, or maybe I want to be doing affiliate marketing in a certain way. So you know who those people are that you would consider to be your colleagues or your joint venture partners. Be looking for those people and connecting with those people on Facebook. Then the third group are those people that I want to learn from. I am a selfimprovement junkie. I am being constantly in learn mode and improve mode and constantly learning about business, so I always want to be connected with people who are where I want to be that I can learn from. 13

14 So those are the three groups of people that I am connecting with on Facebook. Like I said, I like to connect with them on my personal profile and then I come back once we are connected on my personal profile and I ve started to build a relationship with them, within two, maybe four weeks, I will go to my fan page and you will see on your fan page button that says, Suggest to friends. On your fan page, you can suggest your fan page to your personal friends. So when you click on that button, a box opens and you just go through your personal friends and click on the ones you would like to invite to be fans of your page. Since you are adding friends on a consistent basis, you don t ever want to add more than 25 in a day, that s one of those Facebook rules that they don t tell you about. So you are going to be adding friends for a long time. This is not something that s going to happen right now. You want to be sure that part of your strategy is to come back and invite your new friends to become fans of your page. So what I do is that about every two weeks or three weeks, I go back to my fan page, hit that Suggest to friends button and that box appears. You don t have to worry about inviting anyone twice because Facebook won t let you. They will only show you the ones that you haven t invited yet, and you can invite those people to become fans of your fan page. So that is one of my getting connected strategies. PJ Van Hulle: That s cool. I love that. The thing about the events is so cool. Michele Scism: Isn t that cool? I know. PJ Van Hulle: I love that, and like looking for people that are attending events that are like the kind of things you are interested or events that are like the kind of events you offer like I d never heard that before. That s like a total aha takeaway from the call, so I had to interrupt you, I got excited about that. Michele Scism: Oh sure. 14

15 PJ Van Hulle: I actually didn t know about the 25 friends per day thing. I knew there was something. I guess I thought it was 50. Michele Scism: Yeah, now you know it s 25. I know too many people got their hands slapped. PJ Van Hulle: Yeah, I got mine. Actually, I got my account shut down. Michele Scism: Yes, for what? PJ Van Hulle: And I didn t know why. Michele Scism: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, do yourself a favor, stick to 25 or less. Yeah, there are also other things you can do to add fans to your page. There are ways to use Facebook. There is a button that says, Use Facebook as your fan page. So there are different strategies for using that and going out there and going to other fan pages and letting them know about your fan page. I love those kinds of strategies. Those are types of things that we cover in my virtual day. It s very cool. PJ Van Hulle: Great. So then what do you put on your fan page? And we have a question from the blog. Michele Scism: Sure. PJ Van Hulle: Sharon is asking, How do you create a fan page like the one you have? Like how do you have it open up to option for people to sign up for a newsletter, for example? Michele Scism: Oh, okay. There is something called iframe. There is an app called Wildfire iframes, and it s an application so you are looking for the app because I think they have a fan page too, and that s a free service that will allow you to set up those pages. It s pretty much an HTML type of page where if you know code you can do it 15

16 that way, but you know what, I am so non-technical, I just want you to know. I know nothing about those kind of things so I used a couple of those different applications. There are several of them out there, but that s one off the top of my head that I know several people have been using and are liking and it s still free. I heard that they are going to start charging for it, but right now it s still free. PJ Van Hulle: Oh. Michele Scism: So yeah. Was there two questions there, or just one? PJ Van Hulle: Well, that was kind of a sub-question. The main question was, what do you put on your fan page? Michele Scism: Oh, yeah, what do you put on your fan page? Okay, great. You know what, first of all, let me tell you that we each have a unique audience, obviously, right? Anne Cleveland: Yeah. Michele Scism: Our clients are different. What they like is different. So this part of the strategy actually takes some testing, and what you want to do is get out there and start putting some things on your fan page and see what people start to react to. I can give you the examples of what I do because I have tested it. I know what my audience pays attention to and what they like. I am a huge quoteaholic and so is my audience, and so every time I put good, positive quotes out there or business quotes out there, they are always very interactive when it comes to quotes. With blog post, my audience is full of small business owners. Blogging is such a huge strategy these days. It s a great tool. It s something that happens in a blink of an eye where you can read an entire thing and it s done and over within minutes. I think that s one of the attractions of blogging. So I will go out to other people s blogs and find a great blog post and bring it back to my fan page and say, Hey, look at what I found. I think you are going to enjoy this. It s about niching or whatever, and it s by my great 16

17 friend PJ. And I would tag PJ in that update and so I would share that blog or share somebody else s blog, share my blog, it doesn t matter with my audience. This brings a great point and that is that we don t have to create all of the content. We can be the content provider. I ve built an entire business on being a content provider. I do put up plenty of my own content, but I would say that I share more of other people s content than I put out of my own, and it doesn t matter. I realize really early on that it doesn t matter that I m not creating that content because I m getting credit for bringing it to the audience. They don t have to go and find it. I go out. I find all these great content and I bring it to my fan page, and all they have to do is come to the fan page and they get to see all these wonderful stuff. So blog posts are fabulous. With questions, questions are really good. People, they are there for the conversation. They are there wanting to have discussions and so I will go in there and ask a question and things will just go crazy and get started. That question might be something about anything, it depends on what you do, but in my case it might be something about your business or what are two things you are going to do for your business today. It s something real easy. It s not really in depth, but it s enough to get the conversation going, and it gets the community talking to each other, and that s our goal. It s to get the community in action. We are building this community. What other things do I put on there? Well, those are three things. I know there is something else, but it s just not coming to my mind right now. Anne Cleveland: Yeah. Michele Scism: And so Anne Cleveland: I have a questions about video. Michele Scism: Yeah, go ahead. 17

18 Anne Cleveland: Your ideas on video and photos and all those kinds of things. Michele Scism: Yes, that s something. Anne Cleveland: Do you recommend that highly, or do you have any strategy around those kinds of things? Michele Scism: Absolutely. I think video marketing is huge. I think it s very much under used right now. I am a big sharer of video. My audience love video, so sometimes I m putting out my own where I m creating training videos. Sometimes I just go to YouTube and maybe I want to talk about Facebook that day and I don t want to share my own stuff again. I might go to YouTube, find a great YouTube video and just pull it in to my fan page and say, Hey, you know, check out this video, it s awesome. Yeah, that works great. It s really powerful and there are so many videos out there that even if you don t have time to start making your own right now, which I highly recommend and I think everyone should have a video strategy, but get out there and start sharing those other people s videos. There are some good stuff out there. Anne Cleveland: I love this. Just the idea of kind of like you are pulling in material and taking all the time to make it available for your clients. I love it. Michele Scism: Right. Anne Cleveland: So this is a great way to attract clients, and I m wondering what the number one reason that maybe your ideal clients are ignoring you. Michele Scism: Well, I would say that people are ignoring you because there is not enough activity going on in your fan page. I can t tell you how many times I go to a fan page and there has been nothing posted for weeks, and so what happens is you better get your name out there. You are trying to build top of mind awareness and if you are not that old Tom-O, you want somebody to go, Oh, I need to talk with somebody about Facebook. I need to call Michele. So it s great. 18

19 But if you are not there, if you are not putting yourself out there and you are not interacting on your fan page and putting things there even when you feel like nobody is paying attention because in the beginning you will feel like nobody is paying attention, but they are paying attention and they will come around. You have to remember that Facebook has all these sneaky algorithms, so it s very complicated what people actually see and what they don t see, and so your lack of activity on your fan page is going to just like take you off of the map. That is huge. Now, I will add that one or two things a day on your fan page is fabulous. Don t go over four because you will start to tick people off if they see your name too much, but yeah, just get out there and do something. Just commit to doing one thing every day on your fan page and you will be so far ahead of the game, I cannot tell you. It really irritates me when there is nothing on the fan page. It s such prime real estate. I want people to use it. So cool. You know what, the last thing I want to talk about on this strategy before we go on is about getting the word out about your fan page, and I am seeing a lot more business really getting on the bandwagon here. It s exciting. This is why I teach this stuff now. When I drive down the road and I see a sign out in front of the store that says, Visit our fan page. I m like, Yes, they get it. So we have to do everything we can to get our fan page out there. We want to make sure that our website links to it. We want to make sure that our signature has it in there. We want to put it in our newsletters. We want to put it in our store if we have a retail store. We want to do things on Facebook to get it out there. Think about possibly running an ad to just promote your fan page. Now, I did that and got a lot of fans and it got my fan page really off the ground quickly by doing that. You want to go to other fan pages where your audience might be hanging out and interact there, telling them about your fan page. One of the things that I do have, I wrote a blog post about how to get your vanity URL for your fan page. I wrote that blog post. I think maybe 14 months ago at this point, and I used that blog post on other 19

20 people s fan pages all the time. If I go to a fan page and I see that they haven t gotten their vanity URL yet, I will attach the link to an update on their fan page and just say, Hey, I see that you are eligible to get your vanity URL. I thought you might want to see the directions. It s really easy, and if you have any more questions, be sure and stop over at my fan page, Decisive Minds. And I link it to my fan page. So what happens? The fan page owner sees that and then the other people that visit the fan page see that. So we want to do those types of things too. We want to have that marketing edge in our fan page strategy. So how about that? PJ Van Hulle: How much time would you say you actually spend on Facebook on average? Michele Scism: Well, in the beginning, last year whenever I was starting my business and I m really out there looking for clients, I was spending hours every day, probably three or four hours a day on it to be really honest. PJ Van Hulle: Wow! Michele Scism: And I ll tell you what, I am so glad I did because I was able to build a good base in my fan page and it really got to the point where it took off and it really has a life of its own at this point, and so now I visit my fan page twice a day. I go in the morning. I go in the afternoon. Once a week I do an interview of an expert and one of the things we do is we go to the fan page afterwards and we do Q&A. PJ was on my call before and we did that, and it s so much fun. So I don t spend hours there anymore. I spend maybe a total of an hour, 30 minutes twice a day. So yeah, now it s true, it has a life of its own and you will see that the people on your page start to kind of talk to each other and that s what you want. You want it to become this automatic thing, this place for people to go, this community, so that you can create the relationship there. I mean, you ve got to remember that is an important. It doesn t all happen on the fan page. You have to create the relationship and then move people from the social media world into your world. So whether that 20

21 means getting them on the phone with you to talk about your offers, or whether that means having them walk in your retail store, or go to your website to get your free report, you want to make sure that you continue that relationship with them. It s not just all happening on the fan page. PJ Van Hulle: That makes sense, and actually we have a question on the blog. Sharon says that she created a personal fan page and a business one, and I wanted to bring this up on the call because I think this is a situation that a lot of people run into. She says she doesn t actually put much personal stuff on her personal page and people typically see and hear her speak at a conference or festival and then they look her by name and they friend her. Michele Scism: Right. PJ Van Hulle: So that s pretty typical. That s what happens with me a lot as well. Michele Scism: Correct, yeah. PJ Van Hulle: And so her question is, should she shut down her business page. She says right now her newsletter pushes to it and she has tried posting regularly asking questions, et cetera, and didn t get a lot of traffic, whereas her personal page, it has a reasonable following and people like the photos that she post and they respond and ask questions. Michele Scism: Yeah, personal page, meaning personal profile is what I m assuming, and there are some limitations to your personal profile, so you are going to eventually bump up against that number, that 5,000 friends that might sound like it s far away but it will be here before you know it, and then you are going to be like, Oh, what do I do now? So I would keep that business page going and maybe invite some of those personal people to move on over to the fan page too and see if you can keep that working there. 21

22 Another really important part about that and we didn t even touch on this is that there are so much search engine optimization happening on those fan pages. Google and Yahoo, they love Facebook fan pages and profiles, so I would love to see you give it a go and try to keep that one going and see if you can get it up. PJ Van Hulle: So basically, do some of the strategies that you were talking about. Michele Scism: Yeah. PJ Van Hulle: Bring your friends over, get them involved, and I think that one of the things you mentioned that might be going on right here with Sharon and with a lot of people is that people might not be seeing your post because of whatever algorithm that Facebook is using. Michele Scism: Right. PJ Van Hulle: But if you stay regularly with it, it will be more likely that they will start seeing them. Is that true? Michele Scism: That s exactly true. I would venture a guess that everyone knows how tagging works on Facebook. Really this was the next thing I was going to talk about, so let me just do that really quick because I think that this would help in this situation. With tagging, you can tag pictures and all those types of things where you attach a name to it. Well, in an update, you can tag people that you are connected with, and those might be your personal friends and/or your fan pages that you have liked, those types of things, but that gives you massive visibility. So one of the things that works so very well on a fan page is to think strategically about your content and who you could tag with that content. So remember a while ago I said that maybe I would go to PJ s blog or Anne s blog and get a great blog post and pull it into my fan page and leave it as an update. 22

23 One of the things I would want to do is I would want to make sure that I am connected to their fan page or connected to them personally so that I could tag them in that update. To tag people, Facebook has made it really easy and you probably noticed it. When you go to type someone s name, usually a box appears and you can choose their name out of the box if you are friends or if you d like their fan page. Or as you get to that point where maybe I m saying something like, Check out this great blog post about niching from PJ, and when I got to the point where I want to type PJ s name, I could type symbol. That s the other way to do it, and just start typing PJ s name and it would appear in a box. As long as I choose it out of that box and it turns blue, it s tagged. So that s what I m talking about by tagging. So why is that important? It s important for several reasons. Number one, I am posting great content to my 3,000 fans on my fan page. So number one, my 3,000 fans are going to see that. They are going to all get it in their news feed because they are a fan of my page. Number two, I just shared a link to PJ s fan page on my fan page, so when my 3,000 people see it, they might click on her fan page and go to her fan page and hit the Like button so she s happy because I just shared her with my audience. The next thing that happens, the third thing that happens is that by tagging, that update actually is posted on PJ s wall as well. It s on her fan page if I tagged her fan page, and I don t know how many fans you have, PJ, but let s say you have 3,000 fans. What did I just do? I just attached an update from the Decisive Minds with a link back to my fan page on her wall, so any of her people can come and see it now. So the strategy there is, number one, I was looking for a great content to share with my audience and I got that. Number two, I just put PJ s name out in front of my big audience, and number three, I put my name in front of PJ s big audience. Those are the types of things we want to look for in a strategy. So I m saying that to say if you are looking for great content, and let s say you come over to my blog and you find a great blog post and you and I aren t connected yet, then get that URL, know where it is, but go to Facebook real quick and connect with me and make sure you like my fan page or do whatever so that you can tag and get access to my 3,000 people. You want to think a few steps ahead and make sure that you are connected. So does that help? 23

24 Anne Cleveland: This is incredible, and it s also really promoting that idea of a winwin, that you are helping someone, they are helping you, and your strategies and the way you think is so clear how this has worked for you. Michele Scism: Right, it s very cool. Anne Cleveland: And I m wondering about how you specifically would make this work for this specific niche. How people can really capitalize on this whole idea and really focus in on their niche? Michele Scism: I think that Facebook makes that super easy for us because there are so many ways to look for people, to search for people. That Facebook search button is powerful, so what do you know about your people? I have a client who is in the nursing industry. She teaches nurses how to open their own businesses, so she can go to Facebook. She can look up words around the nursing industry in that search button on Facebook and start finding people to connect with, finding events that are happening that she might need to be present for, or might need to have some sort of awareness of, or let them know that she s there and she can start connecting with people who might be doing telesummits that would fit her audience. All of that can happen, all of that is very niche specific on Facebook from that search button by just that one tool. PJ Van Hulle: Yeah, we haven t even gone onto ads. I mean, you can super niche in the ads. Michele Scism: Yeah. Oh, my gosh. PJ Van Hulle: Also, let s say, like if you are promoting some kind of weigh loss thing, you can look up people that are connected to Weightwatchers. Michele Scism: Right, and I could see that. 24

25 PJ Van Hulle: And only have your ads to show up there. Michele Scism: Yeah. I could give you a hundred different ways to do it. It s one of the reasons I have a virtual day and I have a three-day event. PJ Van Hulle: Yeah. Michele Scism: Because there are just so many different possibilities, but listen, guys, find a couple that work for you and do them over and over and over and over. Consistent and persistent, that is my motto, and that s why it works. PJ Van Hulle: Then we ve got the key. The key is if you just do one thing like that. Michele Scism: Right. PJ Van Hulle: So because of that, there has been a lot of great information and ideas, and I ve been taking notes as well because I love marketing on Facebook. What is the first physical action step that if someone is listening to this call, what do you recommend that they take to get started with their Facebook fan page strategy, if there is just one thing you could recommend that people do now? Michele Scism: Absolutely, if you haven t started your fan page, go to the start button and click on Create a fan page and just start answering their questions. It s that easy. You can t screw that because if you do something wrong you can change it. If you ve already created your fan page, I want you to think about your strategy. It s those three things, who you are connecting with, what are you saying to them, and how are you going to spread the word about your fan page. Anne Cleveland: I know you are offering something here for everybody listening to the call. 25

26 Michele Scism: Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned it earlier, I do a virtual day training. It s half Facebook, half LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is another huge, huge area that works so well. So yeah, we spend a day just looking at and developing these strategies. We implement. We get to go out there and we tag. We do all these things live during this virtual event, and it is so great. I have been doing them for about a year now. I love them. People love them. They love the fact that I teach you something, and it s a webinar so you can see it and then they can get off the phone off that call and go implement and then we come back together and we do Q&A and I teach something new, and that works so very well. That s what I wanted to share with everybody. I decided today that I was going to give everybody a half price ticket. So I normally charge 297 for this program, but I want to give you a promo code to take a $150 off, so this a no brainer. You get six hours of training for a $147 and you find out more information about that at and to get the discount you are going to need a promo code and that promo code is also nicheclarity. It s all one word, just put it in just like that, and that will take that off. So I m very excited about that, and listen, I also have a free report, Seven Rules For Creating and Profiting From Your Facebook Fan Page, that I think would be very helpful to everybody on this call. So let me give them an address for that too, if you don t mind. PJ Van Hulle: Yeah. Michele Scism: It s I made it really easy so everybody can find it. So it s DecisiveMinds.com/nicheclarity, and I m sure we can put that on the blog. Is that already there? PJ Van Hulle: Yeah, I m putting it on right now. Michele Scism: Fantastic. PJ Van Hulle: So can you talk about like what exactly happens in the training day like what you cover and what you do. 26

27 Michele Scism: Sure, sure. Yeah, we go in. First of all, there are some bonuses that come because I want you to come to the call with a fan page already started. Okay, it didn t have to be perfect. Just start it. So prior to the event, I send out a couple of videos. I ve created a couple of videos. One is how to set up your fan page and one is how to set up your profile in LinkedIn, and so what we do during the virtual day is we actually focus on developing a strategy for your business. A lot of the things we talked about today, we will go really in depth with them. How do you determine what those things are that your audience is looking for? How do you know who you need to connect with? And what are the places can you find them? Yes, they are in events, but where else can you find them on Facebook? We look at developing the specific strategy for you. Then we move into LinkedIn and that is a whole another world. LinkedIn is so very misunderstood, but it is such a powerful place, especially if you are selling business to business, you need a LinkedIn presence, and so I have some super cool stealth strategies on LinkedIn. One of my strategies, everybody always loves this part of the day, I teach people how to get ranked in the top ten in LinkedIn searches, and it s actually really easy. I just don t have time to tell you right now, but I do cover that on the virtual day, and I had a client one time when I was doing this. I guess it was two classes back and she sent me an the following day saying, Oh, my God, Michele, I got a contract because the guy found me on LinkedIn. I came up number one in the search. PJ Van Hulle: Nice. Michele Scism: I was like, Yipee! I know it works. PJ Van Hulle: And if people can t come to that actual day, can they get a recording of the webinars? Michele Scism: Absolutely, everything is recorded. We put together what we call a hub and we put all kinds of bonus information there. Everything is in one central 27