Originally posted – Mar 25, 2013
If you are like me, a small-business owner, you most likely have heard of Facebook. You may even have a Facebook page for your business, but you may be wondering how to use Facebook practically to promote your business.
I say “practically,” because many social media experts suggest Facebook be used as a “social community,” where businesses engage customers with daily – or even hourly – discussions, updates and other content relating to the business. For most self-service laundry owners, the problem is that we have neither the subject matter with which most people want to engage (when was the last time someone said they looked forward to doing their laundry?) nor the time required to constantly monitor and update conversations on our Facebook pages.
However, one practical way for small-business owners to use Facebook is simply to take advantage of its reach. With more than 1 billion registered users, chances are good that many of your customers are already on Facebook. (My teenage kids like to joke that even their “old” dad has a Facebook page.) If you could somehow “capture” your current customers as they use Facebook in your store and convince them to “like” your Facebook business page, you would have tremendous reach – because every time a customer likes your business on Facebook, all of his or her friends are also exposed to your business.
Think of this process as virtual word-of-mouth advertising on steroids. Rather than waiting for customers to actually say something about your self-service laundry to their friends, by liking your business on Facebook they are automatically telling every friend they have on Facebook that they like your business. Depending on how many customers like your laundry on Facebook, your reach could be thousands of potential new customers.
To achieve reach with Facebook, we ask our customers to like us on Facebook when they use the complimentary WiFi in our laundry. We are able to make this request with inexpensive hot spot software and a WiFi router that can be flashed.
When a customer tries to use our WiFi, he or she is first directed to a “splash page” with general information about our laundry and a link to our Facebook page, asking them to like us. The customer is then directed to the internet homepage of our choice, which is currently our website with a special message thanking them for liking us. From there, customers can go about their use of our WiFi.
The entire process takes customers about 30 seconds and, as long as they continue to like our business on Facebook, they will not be asked to like us the next time they use our WiFi. Depending on the hot spot software used, you may also be able to ask customers for their e-mail addresses, if they want to receive future promotions via e-mail. In addition, hot spot software may be able to charge your customers for WiFi access if you don’t want to offer it for free.
It should be noted that setting up a hot spot is low tech and can be done by anyone who has access to the internet. Flashing your router with hot spot software can be a little tricky, so depending on which hot spot service you chose, they may be able to refer you to vendors willing to sell a router with the software already flashed on it.
Hot spot software is quite affordable. To date, I have spent approximately $75 per laundry for a router and $100 per laundry for the hot spot service. And the results have been better than expected.
In 10 months, we have 800 new likes. Perhaps more importantly, of those 800 new likes, 195,000 friends of the “likers” are now exposed to our laundries, and of these friends roughly 500 are being reached every week. (Facebook defines their reach as the number of unique visitors who have seen any content associated with your page.)
To put the 195,000 friends of likers into perspective, think of each of those friends reached in advertising terms – as an impression. This year’s Super Bowl television ads cost in excess of $3 million per 30-second spot for an estimated cost of three cents per impression. By comparison, our cost with the hot spot approach is one cent per impression. What’s more, we didn’t have to spend millions of dollars on a sexy or quirky Super Bowl ad campaign, and our impressions are arguably more targeted because they are actual referrals from friends.
With only a little time and money invested up front to set up our hot spot, no posts, chats or special content are required to generate effective low-cost word-of-mouth advertising on Facebook.
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