Year of Marketing: My Facebook Plan for March!

My month of Etsy is over and the month of Facebook has begun as part of my Year of Marketing experiment!

Are you following along? How did you go with Etsy?

I definitely saw an increase in traffic and sales to my Etsy store, but I will admit it was not quite as significant as I had hoped. However, it was a busy month in other ways and I didn't quite keep up with my posting schedule and not everything I did had much of an effect. So, moving forward, I'l be keeping up about 50% of the activity on Etsy to see if I can continue to increase traffic and sales!

But now, it's time to keep moving forward and shift my focus to Facebook!

The truth is, I love Facebook for business. It's easy for me to get lost going from one amazing artist business page to the next. I love the way I can promote an item with a big image instead of just a link. And I love that you can share so easily. So all in all, I think I'm going to enjoy this month of marketing!

Here is where I currently stand on Facebook.

I have 971 fans. (Which is awesome - if any of you 971 are reading thank you so much for your support!) There were, on average in February, 42 people talking about me and my reach was 902. My most popular post for February had 83 engaged users and 18.22% virality. Now, some of these figures don't make that much sense to me, but basically, I understand that the main one to consider is the engagement one. Because active fans are worth so much more than inactive ones. While I would love to have 5000 likes on my page, if I still only have 42 people talking about me, or 83 people engaging with my posts, it doesn't mean much in real terms.

And let's face it. The reason I am here is to grow my business and make money. Which means leading people from Facebook to my blog and to my shop where they will eventually buy something! However, it's not all about sales - all engagement is good engagement because it spreads the message of my business further, thus increasing the pool from which I have the possibility of making sales. All good. And at the end of the day, if I am having fun, making friends, getting inspired and learning something along the way, then this whole wheel is going to turn more smoothly for everyone.

My dream-big goal for this month is to double my number of likes!
I know this is unlikely to happen in a month, but I'm a firm believer in the idea that if you achieve all your goals you are clearly not aiming high enough. So I'm aiming high!

Now to the nuts and bolts - here's the plan!

One hour a day dedicated to Facebook, preferably in two half hour blocks or even three 20 minute blocks.

Daily tasks
- Post 3 status updates, one connecting to my blog, one connecteing to my shop and one random update.
- Share 2 posts by others that I think my fans would appreciate or that I think are worthy of promotion.
- Spend time on my news feed liking and making positive and/or useful comments.
- Find 5 new business pages to follow that are relevant to my industry or otherwise interesting to me.
- Introduce myself to at least 2 of these new businesses by commenting positively on their work.

General tasks
- Rewrite and improve upon my about page.
- Work out how to use tabs.
- Run a giveaway/contest throughout the month.
- Read articles on how to utilise Facebook effectively for business.
- Find some influential, successful Facebookers in my industry to follow, study and learn from.
- Experiment with Facebook ads and see if/how this works for my business.
- Experiment with post promotion for a couple of posts this month to see if that is effective.
- Learn about and decide whether to use a landing page.
- Figure out how to effectively direct people from Facebook to my mailing list.

This is the rough plan. But as usual, I will be adding, removing and changing things as I go along according to what's working, what's not working, what's fun and what isn't fun, and of course I'll be trying any new tips I discover along the way.

That's it for today folks! If you don't already, pleeeeaaaaase go like me on Facebook!! Let me know you've come from this post and I'll follow you back so we can help each other on our way to Facebook domination!

Jen x