Ok, I have a Facebook Page – now what? Nobody knows about it.

The short answer:

Post lots of really interesting and engaging content and people will share it with their friends.

The problem was that you couldn’t take your Page into the wider world of Facebook to talk to people.

This has changed. It’s still all about the content but Facebook now lets you use your Page (almost) as if it’s a personal profile. You can, for instance, post on another Page’s wall as your Page rather than having to use a personal profile.

So, for example, if your Page is about your Glasgow restaurant, there are dozens of other non-competing Glasgow- and food-related Pages on which you should be visible. Why? because fans of those Pages may well be interested in you. You can cross the right radars and find ready-made audiences.

There are stacks of other changes to Facebook Pages, some cosmetic and some significant. We’re planning to run an intensive two-hour course on making the most of the new Pages, including custom landing pages*. The cost is likely to be £50 (bargain!) here in our Govan cells. No dates yet but please get in touch to register your interest.

*A custom landing page is the first thing a new visitor sees when they visit your Facebook Page. It’s completely customisable and it’s a terrific opportunity to grab people’s attention and interest. If they choose to like your page, they’ll be taken straight to the wall on their next visit. Here’s an example – on which you can see our very own Chris in a decidedly dodgy shirt :)

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Which begs the question: having written 12 or more (I lost count) of these Haynes manuals, why haven’t I written a guide to social media marketing?

The answer is: for the same reason that Blether stopped offering group training in social media. Our hands-on group sessions, run in partnership with the Go Group for the past two years, were popular and rewarding. BUT if you have ten or twelve companies in a room, you have a need for ten or twelve completely different strategies. One size does not fit all. While we could cover the technical aspects of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, RSS tracking, blogging etc, and talk a lot about broad approaches to social content, we couldn’t focus on any one company’s particular needs.

So we stopped doing it. Now we only work with you on a one-to-one basis. That’s why there’s no step-by-step social media manual (at least from me).

It’s not about the tools. It starts, and ends, with the strategy – and that has to be unique.

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Great fun to shoot and edit (hey, I can do umlauts now!) and über-kudos (see?) to Ashleigh, Chris’s lovely girlfriend, for throwing herself into the role. And to Heleen Kist for finding a dress on eBay that matched the book cover.

Question is: do trailers sell books? On it’s own, a trailer probably won’t generate sales from nowhere. This ain’t no pixie dust. But as part of the wider promotional package, I think it helps. I see it in terms of competitive advantage. If a punter is in the market for a book, then all other things being equal he/she might well be lured by the one that offers a trailer – and, say, the first chapter as a free Kindle download – rather than one that doesn’t. I certainly am.

Our last trailer was for Helen FitzGerald’s Ex, published in Dutch by Ambo Anthos. I asked publicist Laura Starreveld if the trailer was doing the business:

I think the trailer definitely helped, although it’s hard to say how much it exactly did. The trailer was used in an iPad-edition of the magazine Viva, together with a prepublication. A good trailer makes the complete package more attractive. But as I said, we can’t measure it, which makes it impossible to actually prove it helped.

…which I think is spot on. We need to start tracking and evaluating the impact of trailers, giveaways, author blogs, social outreach and so forth in terms of return on investment. It’s all part of a much bigger picture in the movement towards writers taking far greater responsibility for promoting their own work.

Here’s the Ex video. I’m the guy in the white coat, not the pants.

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Our advice? Three words. Change the chef.

Why? Because while we saw plenty of opportunity to get people through the door, nobody would evangelise the food. Nobody would tweet a picture of their steak. Few would come back. Some might post negative feedback.

So what of the Groupon goldrush? Tempting though it may be to offer a spectacular offer to get punters through the doors, you have to ask yourself whether they’ll come back. Are you confident that they’ll enjoy the experience sufficiently to start a relationship with you? Or are you merely servicing one-night stands?

The restaurant mentioned above was in the latter camp. Plenty of people would take advantage of a Groupon deal. Few would return for a second date. Fewer still would abandon old familiar haunts to start a lasting affair.

It’s a fabulous time to be a consumer. You’d be mad to pay full price for anything. There have never been more opportunities to shop around and play the field.

But for businesses seeking to exploit the Groupon/LivingSocial/Facebook Places Deals phenomenon, offering a one-hit wonder at below cost price isn’t going to change your life unless you convert thrill-seekers to long-term lovers.

You’ll only get once chance at that. So figure out:

• Are they going to love you?
• How are you going to keep them?

Anything less is a chocolate teapot – no use to anyone.

pic credit: Steve Way

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