(or let anyone else do for that matter!)

You’ve set up your Facebook Page, tinkered for a while, gained a few fans now it’s time to get serious. You either research “how to promote your business on Facebook” or hire someone else to do it… someone who KNOWS about Social Media.

Stop right there…

Do not, under any circumstances do these following things or let ANYONE else do them or advise you to do them to your Facebook page. If they do ask for your money back and refer them to this post!

1. Posting from Twitter

Linking with Twitter is fine, when you can find the off switch. Not everything is relevant to your Twitter and Facebook followers, you will find you have two sets of “fans”.

When you post from Twitter things like “pop over and like my page http://ow.ly/bla6” to your Facebook page, who exactly is that benefiting? It’s lazy and awkward.

Use a scheduler when short of time like Buffer or Hootsuite or Facebook’s own scheduling feature (it’s FREE!)

2. Your Profile Picture Doesn’t Fit

Why? There is NO need for this – almost anyone with some sort of photo editing software can rectify this. Whether it be chopping, cropping and pasting make it fit, this is your “shop front” it appears in your fans news feeds. It needs to be clear, bright and stand out.

Your profile image needs to be saved as 180×180 pixels but will display as 160×160 pixels, it sits 23 pixels from the left and 210 pixels from the top of your cover image.

3. Your Cover Image doesn’t follow the “less than 20% rule”

Amongst others…

Your Cover photo should be unique to your business, must not contain any sales language, calls to action, telephone numbers, website details and MUST be less than 20% text. I can hear you now “does it really matter?” Yes, yes it does. Facebook will remove cover images!

Your cover should be 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes for fast loading.

Facebook Guidelines

Choosing a Cover Photo

4. You Start Running Facebook Adverts and Sponsored Stories

I’m not saying don’t run them, far from it. Just don’t do it yourself if you don’t know what you are doing and have no experience with PPC or Google Adwords.

Facebook has a far more targeted platform because of the information it has about it’s users. Targeting is the key and using the right stories and adverts to target your market is paramount. It could end up costing you a small fortune without using the right settings and budget.

The benefit of using adverts and sponsored stories is gaining more fans, interactions and broadening your prospects with targeted “likes”. Yes, essentially you are buying fans BUT they are people interested in what you have to offer so are far more likely to buy, connect and interact with you.

If you use an agency or a third party to create your ads and run your campaigns, make sure they have experience in doing so and are not charging you a small fortune for very little return. I recently saw an advert appear in my feed for over a week and the like count did not go up at all, it clearly was not targeted, there was no explanation as to what or who the company were (the profile picture didn’t fit!), and it was of no interest to me whatsoever. I suspect a blanket “target everyone in the immediate area” strategy was implemented with no thought or consideration applied.

From my experience expect a click to cost between 0.04p and 0.30p depending on industry and demographic. To work out the cost of a fan can vary, but in any case the majority of clicks generate “actions” which can include liking the page, liking a post, sharing a post, viewing a photo, posting a comment and clicking external links.

Finally if promoting an image – this also needs to meet the less than 20% text rule.

5. You post all your Page updates in one fell swoop

Possibly my biggest pet hate of all!

I love following pages, I like to know what everyone’s up to and I discover great articles and products along the way. What I cannot bear is when a page suddenly posts 10 updates consecutively, in one fell swoop, then doesn’t post again for days.

• This is a major turn off for any fan, they will either hide you, unlike you or send you to SPAM
• There is no need, use the Facebook Schedule option!
• If you don’t have time, use Buffer or Hootsuite

6. Do not SPAM other people’s Pages

It may not be intentional, you may not realise you are doing it, but if Facebook thinks you are – BOOM – you will get a ban or a limitation on your account. I’ve seen various small businesses lose posting rights and admin rights from 15 – 60 days on their pages because of bad techniques.

I’m sure they thought at the time they were marketing their page to potential fans, it doesn’t work. All you need is a few bad eggs to mark your post as SPAM and you are done. Additionally, if you post a similar introductory comment (even though invitied to do so by the Page owner) Facebook may flag this immediately and ask you “Do you really want to post this?”

7. Like and Share Competitions

These are completely and utterly against Facebook Promotion Rules and Guidelines. You should not ever run a “like” or/and “share” competition on your Facebook Page. You could lose your entire account if found by Facebook.

They won’t find you though, right? Yep they will! Facebook Insights are a powerful tool, an event will ping at Facebook HQ when a page starts getting serious amounts of traffic that was previously quiet. Additionally (referring to SPAM haters above) people will click and send you to SPAM, another red flag at HQ.

It is so very easy to run a competition on Facebook there are several cheap and FREE options (albeit free are not always pretty to look at).

Use Tabsite (my recommended choice) (affiliate link) or another that clients are using as it’s really easy to set up is called Giveaway. Run it as a sweepstakes competition and use it to collect and build your email database. We’re all guilty of partaking in the odd like and share competition, it’s so easy to like and share! When you think about it, how has it really benefited the page?

Compers trawl Facebook for such opportunities, yes your likes will go up, but so does the expectation “when’s the next competition?”

The number of likes on your Page is not the be all and end all of Facebook, yes fans matter – but only targeted, qualified fans who are engaged and interested in your products and services. Which brings me to my final point..

8. Buying “fans” from Ebay

Never. Ever.

If numbers matter to you, forget the number of fans and check your bank balance instead – the latter should be the larger. 🙂

Have you got any points you think I missed? Please add them below and PLEASE share with your fellow business owners and get the message out that the above should not be part of your Business on Facebook!