Mykidstime’s mission is to be the best listings website for parents looking for information on activities and classes for their children in their local area (in Ireland). Disclaimer: I have been helping them with their Facebook presence.
Growing your Facebook fan base is about nurturing and caringfor your community, providing them with content, conversations and activities that are especially for them.
The following are some of the ideas we’ve implemented at Mykidstime to help grow their Facebook community over the last three months:
Step 1: Create a special welcome for your community. Customising your Facebook page not only increases the numbers of likers but also gives you an opportunity to include specific calls to action.
Below is the Mykidstime Facebook welcome tab, which we customised to include a newsletter sign up call to action (top right), and a welcome video from the Mykidstime owners, Jill and Michelle.
Step 2: Make Facebook a great place for your community to hang out. Your Facebook page needs to offer something that your fans can’t get elsewhere.
We created a Locations tab to allow the Mykidstime Facebook user to easily find and click through to their local Mykidstime Facebook page. This means that regardless of which one of the Mykidstime Facebook pages a Facebook user lands on, they can quickly find their own region and information.
Step 3: Involve your community with your content. Getting your community on Facebook to help generate content ensures that that your content is attractive to that same community.
We involved the Mykidstime community in our content creation strategy, one of the ideas that we came up with was to create a Christmas Treats Recipes e-Book made up entirely of recipes submitted by our community, the parents.
Step 4: Create special events for your community. Special events will allow you to quickly create high levels of interaction amongst your fans.
We ran a series of events on the main Facebook page, the most unique been a series of Facebook Live Q&A with representatives of the political parties in the run up to the Irish General Election.
Step 5: Give your community what they want. Get to know your community well so that you can ensure that your Facebook page gives them unique opportunities and provides them with a place of value online.
These Live Q&As gave the Mykidstime community the opportunity to ask the political parties about the issues that directly affect them.
Step 6: Reward your community. Your community will act as your brand ambassadors but it’s very important to let them know that you appreciate their efforts.
To reward any members of the Mykidstime facebook community that went the extra mile on our behalf, so we created a Fan of the Month to say thank you.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmpnD_DuQw4&feature=related[/youtube]
The Results:
The total Mykidstime Facebook community has grown by 62% to 10144 fans in just over 3 months. More importantly however is that interactions with Mykidstime content on Facebook has gone up 100s of percentages during the period.
In other words, they are now starting to develop an engaged, invested and cared for community on Facebook. Website traffic has also seen an increase, with traffic from Facebook having more than doubled and going from 8% to 15% of the total site’s traffic.
Conclusion:
The fundamental reason why a small business, like Mykidstime can deliver results so quickly on Facebook is that they genuinely care about their community. The people who make up their Facebook community matter greatly to the business and to the owners of the business.
In turn, everything that attempt to do on Facebook is to support and nurture their community, and the community has responded accordingly.
While this might at first seem like a simple enough concept, It’s actually not! And the main reason behind why many small businesses continue to struggle with Facebook.
Please share any other examples of small businesses using Facebook really well in the comments below.
Thanks for reading,
Niall
