How to Build a Better Relationship With Your Facebook Fans

How do I get my Facebook fans to love me? The key word here is “connect”. To build a better relationship with your Facebook fans, you need to connect with them. If you want a genuine relationship with your Facebook fans, you must engage and build your community through conversation and become a resource that solves your fans’ problems.

Here are 12 proven ways to build a better relationship with your Facebook fans.

1. Use your fans’ first names

When you speak to someone for the first time, you almost always ask for their name, right? That’s because you know people like hearing their names and instantly feel a deeper connection when you call them by name.

The same principle applies for Facebook pages, especially when connecting with customers. Using a name to sign off on comments and updates helps build trust with fans because they have a person to relate to, instead of a logo. If an individual’s name can’t be used, team names work too.

Also, instead of just “liking” comments left on your Facebook page, try to engage and create a conversation with your fans. They will thank you for it.

2. Give your fans insight into your business

Take your Facebook fans on a journey with you. Don’t be afraid to show them that your business has a more personal side. This can be achieved in many ways, from showing a “behind the scenes” view of the team working on latest projects to new business launches and key milestones.

It’s important to be transparent with your fans by not just showing your successes but also showing your challenges and failures.

Also, there’s nothing wrong with asking fans about areas your business could improve. It could be as simple as asking your Facebook fans which product or service they prefer. This type of interaction helps increase trust with your fans and shows that you appreciate their point of view.

The result is your fans will be more likely to know you’re listening and to stick by you in the long run.

3. Involve your fans

Marketers have traditionally spent huge amounts of money creating content that resonates with their audience.

These days, with the rise of social media, brands should be leveraging two-way commutation — not only for brand transparency and customer service, but also for content creation.

The term UGC refers to “user generated content”, or content that has been created by your audience. UGC is a great way for businesses to encourage sharing and include their audience as part of an overall content strategy. There are many ways to encourage UGC from your fans.

Here are a few ideas to help get you started.

• Ask for photo uploads around a theme – “What does your workspace look like? Send us a picture of your desk. We would love to see!”
  
  
• Use photo/video uploads as a contest or giveaway – “What reminds you of summer? Upload your photo/video using #iLovesummer for a chance to win.”
  
  
• Ask your audience to share their thoughts or images on your products/services – “Where are you enjoying our fruit smoothie this morning? Upload your photo/video for all to enjoy!”

4. Use Facebook competitions

Facebook competitions are a great way not only to reach and involve your audience, but also to build leads for your business. There are many benefits to running a competition on your Facebook page, including:

• Increasing your fan base
  
  
• Raising awareness of your product/service
  
  
• Increasing the size of your email list
  
  
• Encouraging customer loyalty

Competitions are a great example of two-way interaction with your audience. Your fans get a chance to win your product/service and in exchange they provide information, such as an email address.

5. Be transparent and authentic with your community

The businesses that kill it on social media are mostly the ones that are transparent and authentic with fans, being truthful in their marketing and open in their sharing. This entails them knowing their audience through and through.

Remember, relationships are not built overnight. You need to be a consistent and genuine to build those raving fans over time. And the more you get to know your audience, the more genuine and trustworthy you can become.

6. Host a Q&A session to help your fans

A great way to further develop the one-on-one relationships you have with your fans is to answer their questions by hosting a Q&A on your page. Q&A’s make it possible for fans to ask any questions they want and gives you the chance to highlight and answer the most commonly asked questions. It’s a great way to build your reputation as a helpful “go-to” resource and can be done by responding to questions in comments below a status update or via video reply.

Answering questions helps demonstrate your ability to both listen to your fans and provide added value by solving their problems.

A good tip is to keep Q&A’s as a regularly scheduled event, making it consistent by doing a weekly update or video.

7. Don’t ignore your fans

Part of being social is being open and responsive with your Facebook fans, including responding to customer questions and complaints and providing feedback. Responsiveness is particularly important when problems and issues arise and your fans point them out. Responsiveness will help strengthen your relationship with Facebook fans and is essential to your overall strategy when building an online presence.

Simply ignoring problems by not responding (or closing your Facebook wall) will not make the problems go away. If anything, it will only make things worse and damage your brand’s reputation.

Quick tips on what NOT to do:

• Don’t close your Facebook wall.
  
  
• Don’t leave comments unanswered. If you don’t know the solution right away, leave a message to say you’re looking into it.
  
  
• Don’t NOT respond to comments within 24 hours.
  
  
• Don’t leave a question unresolved. If you’ve provided all the help possible, let your audience know and apologise for the inconvenience, instead of sending them in circles for more information.
  
  
• Don’t only reply to positive comments. Responding to negative comments can be just as powerful for your brand because helping a customer in need will often turn them into a loyal follower.

8. Ensure you’re there to engage with your fans

When it comes to planning your social media content, there are many opinions on how to do it. Should you schedule your content in advance or post in real time, or a mixture of both? The best way to approach this scenario is to see what works best with your audience.

There’s nothing wrong with scheduling content. We all know that no matter how hard we try, we can’t be online 24/7. The key factor is to make sure you’re there to engage once your scheduled posts publish and not just schedule and forget about the posts. This also applies to real time posts.

9. Showcase your fans

Now that you have your fans engaging with your Facebook page and creating conversation, the next step is to show them you appreciate their input by thanking them for their participation.

For example:

• post a thank you message as a status update
  
  
• highlight your top fans via a cover image
  
  
• showcase the most active fans via a Facebook app

10. Ask fans for input

Brands that have good relationships with their Facebook fans listen to them. But how do they get feedback? The simple answer is they ask their fans for it directly. The benefits of asking fans for feedback are:

• Feedback is from your target audience, so you know the opinions directly reflect those that will be purchasing, viewing or downloading your content.
  
  
• Information can be used to gather more marketing data from your audience. Are they mobile only? Do they prefer e-books, videos, emails? This information can be used to target and promote future content.
  
  
• Help to generate content ideas. Ask your fans what topics they’d like to learn more about and provide content you know your audience is hungry for.

Once you’ve built a reputation with your Facebook fans, you will be surprised at how open and honest their feedback will be in return. All you have to do is ask!

11. Post at the right time of day

You want to make sure to start conversations when your Facebook fans are online. Only a small percentage of your fans see your updates in their newsfeeds anyway. So how do you increase the chances of being seen? Apart from promoting the post, a great organic way to do this is to identify the times your Facebook fans are most active online.

Facebook insights allows you to view this very stat, helping you to identify when your fans are online and the average number who saw your posts in an hour. Use this data to help you identity the time of the day your fans are most engaged and you will increase the chances of your posts getting seen and engaged with.

It’s important to remember there’s no golden time that suits all pages. You have to see what times works best for your specific audience with regards to both frequency and the times you post.

12. Celebrate your successes with Facebook milestones

Celebrate your businesses’ key achievements — both small and big — through Facebook milestones. Facebook milestones are a great way to build your relationship with your Facebook fans by sharing your journey and giving them insight into the key moments of your business’ journey. Milestones are automatically expanded on your Facebook timeline and also offer a great way to showcase your brand’s history.

Here are a few ways you can use Facebook milestones.

• Highlight the launch date of your business
  
  
• Highlight a milestone in fans reached e.g. 10,000 fans
  
  
• Highlight the launch of a new product/service
  
  
• Highlight your brands history – how and where it started

SOURCE: Post Planner