One of our Bush Business Online participants recently asked “I see business pages popping up all over the place for places like Sunshine Coast & Noosa. I got into a panic and continued creating pages for the different areas my business covers, not wanting to miss out, but it appears there can be hundreds of pages for the same place. I was thinking it would be a marketing strategy for us, as people that want to camp on Fraser Island aren't interested in Teewah or Noosa North Shore. Is there a place for this, multiple pages? I look forward to your comments.”
Our opinion is that generally you should have 1 core page that concentrates on the overall values/ products/ services of your business and, if necessary, 1 to 2 additional pages that breakdown into your key market segments. Anymore than that and you run the risk confusing your followers and creating a moderation, engagement and content nightmare for yourself.
We suggest you start with 1 to 2 pages and grow from there. This way you know your capacity to administrate and moderate and supply valuable content. Smaller numbers of pages also allow you to answer questions and provide meaningful quality conversation that solves your customer’s problems or inspires their desire.
Tabs are another way that you could breakdown your product or service offerings without the hassle of making another page.
Don’t get caught up in the hype of trying to grab names for names sake. If someone is on Facebook and they are looking for products or services, they are more likely to type in “Where should I go camping this Easter?” onto their wall or on their friends wall then go to the search bar and type in camping.
Also remember that, people trust their friend’s opinions 90% of the time over a Google search. So instead of focusing on searchability on Facebook I would concentrate on encouraging existing customers to 'like' your page and share their comments, experiences and photos on your page (maybe even create a competition around sharing a photo to encourage this).
There is a big difference between getting leads and getting a lookers. If a person lands on a page that has shallow content coupled with spam and boring one way conversations they are more likely not to convert to a lead. Alternatively, if a person lands on a page that has engaging photos, good conversation that solves their problems then your leads will increase. Couple this with original content around topics related to your business and your looker to lead ratio will surely increase.
To be able to find out which pages to keep and which to drop we suggest that you start analysing and tabling your pages data. I suggest you start to pull some reports from all pages by going into your ‘edit page’ going to ‘insights’ then going to ‘export’.
So there are definite advantages to having more than one page but equally so there are many disadvantages to have too many fb pages, it is about finding the balance and what is most effective at converting lookers into leads.
Some examples of topics you could write on that might capture your target’s eye - ‘eg Top 10 tips on how to get the girlfriend to like camping? How to go camping without any gear, or how to stop the wife whinging about the set up during camping?’ .
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