Tuesday Tips: If you do Direct Sales, Consider a Facebook Group

While the title may sound counter-intuitive to my normal posts talking about Facebook Pages and such, Facebook groups are a great way to market and insure a lot higher rate of viewing than many pages do. If you are an author or a direct sales person (like Avon, Scentsy, Jewelry in Candles, etc.) groups may be of benefit to you.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying to go solely with a group - a page will help as well, but having a group will also help spread the word and increase interaction.

Facebook Group have a distinct advantage in that members can chose to receive direct notifications about updates to the group. They may receive daily updates or updates only from specific members, such as you. You can also limit the group to where only you can create posts and your clients can respond to them.

Facebook groups are great for games and contests as well as special sales.  If you haven't considered a group, check some of them out - you might be surprised how useful they can be.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Saturday Stats: Facebook Page Reach Plummets to 1% - Here's What You NEED to Know

If you have a Facebook Page with more than 100 Followers, you know that over the past few months, fewer and fewer people have seen your posts.  It used to be about 5%, then 3%.  Now it's 1% or less.  And frankly, that just sucks.

As mentioned in the second article posted yesterday, a lot of it has to do with fan engagement.

However, there are other things you need to know in order to maintain your marketing presence via Facebook.

Ad Week published this article regarding how Facebook is slashing organic reach.  It has some interesting points as to why Facebook is doing this - Facebook is a company and it does need to make money, thus changing algorithms to encourage companies to pay for marketing.

Vocus, however, put together this article which tells you a lot of other things you may not know, including:

The new reality on Facebook is that 99 out of 100 Fans will never see your (unpromoted) Posts. And it may actually be worse: Facebook says that users are exposed to about 1,500 potential pieces of content per 20-minute session. 

That's a lot of information for individuals to process.

It continues to give advice as to what you should do to help your marketing on Facebook, including promoting posts.  Let's be honest here.  You know you have to spend money to make money.  Facebook has been free for quite some time, but they have to pay their employees too.  Use part of your marketing funds each month to promote important posts on Facebook to get the maximum exposure.

And check out other posts here for ways to encourage participation so more people see your posts.

Best of luck!