Today we are going to cover the final 7 mistakes bar owners are making when promoting their Facebook business page. So a quick recap was watch out for using illegal Facebook covers, don’t put out more than 1 post per day or you don’t get the best outreach, focus on getting people to engage such as like, share, and comment on your posts rather then just putting up your specials and promotions, and the last one was make sure you are capturing people’s information by posting up a link to your lead capture pages.
Mistake number five is too much text. Facebook research has shown that posts between 100 and 250 character, one or two lines of text, get 60% more Likes, comments and shares than ones that are more than 250 characters. Buddy Media research found a similar trend, determining that posts with 80 characters or less in length have 27 percent higher engagement rates. The idea here is keep it short and sweet to increase your engagement.
Mistake number 6 is breaking Facebook contest guidelines. You can’t just run any contest you want You need to follow Facebook’s rules or you’ll get your account banned. I’ll give you a few rules here that you need to know but if you want all of them, click this link in this video transcript
One rule I see broken all the time is contests that ask people to like, or vote by comments in order to win. You can’t do this and yes I’ll admit, I used to do this to until I did learn the hard way last year.
You also need to make sure that your contests run inline with local and state liquor laws. Another guideline is, If you run a contest or giveaway, it must be ran through a Facebook app or a canvas page and you can’t notify the winner through wall posts, messages, or chats.
Contests are a great way to get people to engage with you but there are a lot of restrictions you have to watch out for. Make sure you read the guidelines. If you need help creating a contest and a Facebook app to run the contest, contact me at Bar Owner TV and I can get you set up within 24 hours.
Lets move on to mistake number 7, not taking advantage of Facebook ads. Facebook ads are great because you can pin point exactly who you want to target, similar to direct mail. You can target by location, interests, age, gender, and multiple other ways.
What I love the most about this is you can only pay per click, meaning if someone see’s your ad and doesn’t click, you don’t get charged. So you’re still getting free branding out of this too.
You can set your budget to $25 a week or $25 a month or even less if you need to. You create your own budget. What’s great about this is you are going to get nearly 100% of pure qualified people clicking on your ads because if someone isn’t interested in your offer or even going to your bar, they are not going to click on your ad which means you’re not wasting money.
The way to get the most bang for your buck from Facebook ads is to promote your lead capture pages through your advertising. This way you’re getting the person’s email, name, address, phone number, and whatever else you want to get. This allows you to keep building and building your most valuable asset you can have as a bar owner. A list of people who WANT to hear from you so you can market to them about new specials and promotions.
This is a strategy I teach all my private clients and I actually do all this work for them. If you’d like a fully automated system for capturing people’s information from Facebook and sending them monthly e-mails, direct mail, and social media messages, please contact me. Having automated systems for turning new customers into loyal regulars is a system that every bar owner needs to increase sales and profits.
If there are any Facebook contests or promotions you’ve ran before that have been a big success, please tell us about them below. I’ll see you on the next show.
