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One of the challenges faced by small businesses who want to have a presence on Facebook is the famous ”what now”. The "what now" provoke immediately after creating the Facebook page (unless you have a budget for consultant or agency). The administrator has literally followed the steps to register your business but once the page is displayed on-line all the questions: what do I do?, What should I say?, how do I get people to point to my site? . It is known that at the beginnings it was hard, so with a practical approach and based on our experience, we offer a short guide to first steps to help achieve a critical mass of fans on Facebook, say 1000 fans to round numbers.

1. Create a quality image:

After opening your Fan Page and before proceeding to share with your contacts, make sure you have good cover photo and profile photo. Yes, always consistent with your corporate image. Stick with the logo or an image that represents your products or services, it is important that the images should have a good resolution and modified to the default sizes of Facebook: the cover photo is of 851 × 315 pixels and the profile: 160 × 160 pixels. Blurred images or colors that blend well to give a bad image of your site.

You can find more information at the following Facebook page:  What standards must meet the cover photo of my page?

2. Share with family and friends

For the first round of "like" our recommendation is to throw friends request in your inner circle. As your family and friends must be aware of your business and more importantly spent an hours talking to them about your work, a "like" is not enough. Send them e-mails with the link to the page or directly invite them using the button 'Invite Friends' located in the administrative panel of the page.

3. Give personality to your site:

Not only the cover and profile photos give the personal touch to your site, well it does determine the first impression but thereafter you have to be in continuity in sharing content with your target audience and that information received by the fan justifies that "like". For example if you are a hotel chef shares recipes, beauty tips for women employees of the spa, etc.. Do not just link to news, videos and pictures you've seen on other websites / blogs.  Attempts to create your own content or if you see it too complicated, mark a work of original selection related to your sector.

4. Link your Facebook channel with other promotional materials:

Do not forget to link to the Facebook page from your site and from the newsletter that you send to your customers. Plus you can also enter the link in the signature of all your emails. If you have business cards, brochures, posters, etc.. Put the link of your Facebook page. An effective alternative way is to do it by generating a QR code to let the person scan directly there. Ideal for packaging’s, if you sell a physical product or letter if your business is a restaurant.

5. Connect with your fans and create a new promotion:

Once you have promoted to your family, friends, important contacts and several customers, the next steps are of acquiring new fans. Initially acquiring new fans would be slower. To accelerate growth we recommend a strategy as old as trade itself, i.e. use promotional campaigns to publicize your business. Thus you may offer a direct incentive to people to become a fan of your site.  Promotion can be used to test the impact on your site by using an Easypromos app.

Once you have an ease, you can take a look at all the types of promotions that can be done with Easypromos and decide which best fits to your site. In Easypromos over 75,000 promotions has been done, so we know that promotions on Facebook work very well, both to attract new fans to the loyalty of existing ones.

6. Use Facebook Ads:

You do not have the budget of a multinational to promote your business with ads on Facebook. Even with 10$ a day can get results as it only pay for clicks received. The biggest benefit is offered through segmentation by location, age, gender but mostly interest. You can be as specific campaign such as launching only to those who like a particular song, a food or a brand of shoes. Link the ad to recommend a promotion as well as the entrance of new visitor with immediate reward: the chance to win something.

The next step would be to care for existing fans and grow. Our recommendation in this case, when you already have a Facebook page running, would delegate or outsource its management to a professional consultant, community manager or communications agency . These professional services will help you take your Facebook page to a new level.