8 Tips for Finding Local Clients on Facebook
There’s a good chance that most of the potential clients in your local area are on Facebook. By connecting with those clients, you can increase awareness of your business, answer customer questions or provide customer service, and ultimately add to your bottom line.
Yet, those local clients aren’t always easy to find. Even if there are 10,000 potential clients in your area, you’re still filtering through a haystack of over 900 million users – and growing.
So, how do you find your way through all of the noise, then locate and interact with your potential clients? Here are a few guiding principles that will help you in that process:
Start by reaching out to existing clients.
The most important element in social media marketing is the social aspect. If you want to get your business in front of potential clients in your local area, you need to connect with locals. The best way to start that process is by getting your existing or previous clients to connect with you. Give them an incentive to do so – providing a discount on your services, a referral fee, or even just a warm conversation will put you on their radar, and they can then begin to share your business with their friends and family.
Connect with other local businesses and organizations.
If you’re a member of the local Chamber of Commerce, make sure you connect with them on Facebook, as well. The same goes for those businesses you work with on a regular basis, whether they’re clients of yours or not. Supporting local Facebook causes such as a Relay for Life team can be beneficial as well, and it also gives you the opportunity to give back to the community.
Take great care with your profile information.
In many cases, Facebook users will decide whether or not to like your page based on what’s in your profile. Make sure your profile information is well-written, clear, and that it identifies where your business is located. You might even consider bringing in a copywriter or your sales writer in order to create this information for you.
Ask for shares and recommendations.
While you don’t want every Facebook post to say “please tell all of your friends about us,” It doesn’t hurt to ask for shares (in the case of media you’ve posted) or even just recommendations. This actually goes hand in hand with the next tip; it’s interesting content that’s most likely to be shared, even without asking.
Provide interesting and useful locally flavored content.
Even your most loyal customers will probably un-like your Facebook page if all you do is post links to your website, or beg for business. Consumers today use Facebook for a variety of purposes, not the least of which is simply gathering information. If you provide interesting, insightful, locally-flavored content on your Facebook page, you’ll gather and retain more local followers.
Create regular updates.
How often you should update your Facebook page isn’t always clear. On the one hand, you want to update often enough that your existing followers have something to remind them about your business, and that they have something to share with their Facebook friends. On the other hand, you don’t want to spam your followers’ feeds. For most businesses updates anywhere from twice a week to twice a day are probably appropriate.
Consider Facebook ads.
Facebook ads are another potential way to get your business in front of local clients. When you create a Facebook ad campaign, you can target your ads based on geography, demographics, interests, and a number of other factors. The more narrowly you define your ad campaign, the more effective it will be over the long run.
Explore page apps.
There are a number of Facebook page apps that you can install, each of which will fulfill a different purpose. Some are an enticement to like your page, and might offer the reader a discount or other benefit. Other apps allow you to run a contest. Take a look through the list of available Facebook page apps, and see if there are any that would seem to fit your page.
The success of your Facebook marketing efforts depends on your ability to connect with actual potential customers. Having 30,000 followers of which only 2,000 are actually located in your region isn’t particularly useful. Follow these tips to more narrowly focus your Facebook marketing efforts and connect with those local clients.
Scott Desind is a Los Angeles Traffic Ticket Attorney specializing in getting speeding tickets dismissed. Scott and his Traffic Attorneys are well known for their experience of successfully fighting traffic tickets for drivers in the Los Angeles area.
