Buddy Web Design

Social Media Marketing is not limited to Facebook.There are many other platforms or websites or resources from Google like Google my business which needs attention or consideration.

This blog entry is part inspired by a client I met yesterday regarding his website and Facebook page and partly inspired by a friend who has changed careers and who is going into Social Media Marketing on behalf of clients.

This is not a well researched article but just a blog entry sharing some thoughts.

Firstly my client is a plumber and he asked that we open a plumbing Facebook page for him because business is slow. Once the page was opened he did not understand that he has to interact with the public to get more likes for the page. I explained to him that, similalry to web design opening a Facebook page for a business might not give you the returns you were hoping considering the hours you have to put in to get actual results and that we should rather concentrate our efforst to improve his website text. We started doing that today. It was a nice surprise to see that the Google my business page I opened for him resulted in 4 phone calls and i website visitor over the past 30 days. This resulted in 4 jobs for him which is nice considering hos monthly website hosting costs only R165 p.m. . The Google my business page is included in our web design packages. I am definitely going to be spending more time looking at Google my business and getting returns for my clients. People simply are not interested about web design or plumbers and what they do as they are interested in pubs, restaurants, nice photographs events etc. The same applies to Tyres. It is viewed somehow as a grudge purchase and does not fair well on Facebook.

What we have done many times on Facebook is to share our clients websites on Facebook when people ask in groups for certain products or services. By getting a website from us you can trust that we will do the same for you.

The biggest problem with doing Facebook marketing on behalf of someone else is that you in fact become a representative of that person or that company. So you have to pay someone to be you. Not only for the time spend sharing content and posts but also for the time to be creative and come up with content that will: 1.) Grow your Facebook page 2.) Improve your public image 3.) People would like to share 4.) Help people to decided to buy your product or make use of your services. This can not be done without effort / time and time is expensive. We might think we have a lot of it to give away but we don't. I have found a handful of people with Facebook pages who get good results from it without advertising on Facebook. I think that's where the real value lies in Facebook marketing.

Facebook keeps on developing new features and tools and can not be ignored but one has to try and calculate the return vs the input cost. Some people would argue about brand image etc. and yes people are willing to pay people considerable amounts of money for managing their Facebook pages and campaigns. Being also an accountant I like to measure real results vs real costs/efforts.

The worst thing you can do is to have a listing or page on places like Facebook or Tripadvisor or a Google my business page and then not respond to negative reviews which your business might get. Then your efforts are working against you. We have seen restaurants with Facebook pages not responding to negative reviews which would put off potential new customers.

We are looking for people who want to market our web design services and our product offering on Facebook and we are willing to pay good commission as marketing takes up a lot of our time ourselves. We do get business from organic search results and from directly contacting people and businesses we meet on Facebook but we do not mind paying commission if someone actively markets our services or even if they just do it casually.

I am actually busy with an accounting assignment so this quick blog is what it is. Just some thoughts ...