5 Ways To Market Your Personal Brand With Your Facebook Business Page

Your Facebook business page is an opportunity for your audience to learn more about your brand. Here are the top five areas of your page that you must focus on to engage your Facebook fan and strategically market your brand.

1. Utilize your profile picture

Your Facebook profile picture is initial opportunity to demonstrate your brand to your followers.
Choose a high-quality image of yourself and work with your graphic designer to design a custom designed banner that is consistent with your brand. You have 180 X 540 pixels  of space to work with; so, take this opportunity to express your core message: who you are, what you do, and for whom you do it for.

2. Create a Facebook landing page

Facebook landing pages are your prime opportunity to welcome your fans and tell your brand story. Gary Vaynerchuk’s landing page literally tells his story and is a great example of using this medium to promote yourself to your audience in a fun way.
There are a number of services and applications available that will customize your Facebook landing page that fits with your brand and your budget. Many of the do-it-yourself applications offer a free trial, so be sure to play around and investigate before you decide on one to use. For more information, check out Orli Yakuel's comparisons in her blog post "The 12 Best Ways to Customize Your Facebook Pages" for Tech Crunch.
A key element to creating a fan page that converts visitors to fans is the “like-gate” feature. This basically requires page visitors to “like” your page in order to view the content. By nature, most people are curious and want to feel that they are a part of something exclusive. A few strategies you can use to play this up are to offer your fans:

• Exclusive discounts and coupons
• First look at product announcements
• Video reveals
• Giveaways and contests
• Free resources including tips, white papers, articles, etc.

3. Get creative with photos

Pictures are a visually appealing and fun way to engage your audience. Pam Lawhorne, The Social Maven, does an excellent job of staying on brand by incorporating her pictures with her colors and tying them into themes  with her “entrepreneur of the day”, “question of the day”, and “30 days of gratitude” campaigns.
Another creative tactic is to make use of your Facebook photo strip. The photo strip consists of the five default photos at the top of your page. Companies are using this to highlight their products, introduce team members, and to further tell their brand story. Check out this Social Fresh’s blog post for ideas to incorporate this into your business page.

4. Effectively use your “info” tab.

The “info” portion of your business page is another opportunity to connect your followers across all of your social media platforms.  Do not assume that your fans know that you are available on other social media outlets and include links to your blog, twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

5. Keep your content fresh and relevant.

A golden rule of personal branding is to keep yourself in front of your audience at all times.  Having pretty pictures and landing pages are great, but without a constant, clear message that relates to your followers, it is a waste of time.
To develop fresh content, ask yourself:

• What keeps your audience up at night?
• How do you solve their problem?
• What are related topics of interest that you can link to?

Here are a few strategies to keep a constant presence:

• Schedule your status updates in advance with a service such as MediaFeedia.com. A word of caution… while this will help keep your posts consistent and constant, you still must log on and interact with your audience – answer comments, reach out to your audience, and build relationships.
• Create a Google alert on the related topics that you identified so that you can easily link to relevant articles and blog posts that are of interest to your audience.
• Create a weekly or daily theme to help focus your message or questions. For instance, I am known for incorporating pop culture and lyrical references in the delivery of my messages on personal branding so I created a pop culture question of the day, you can find an example on my Kimberly Bordonaro Personal Branding page.

So, what did I miss? How are you using your Facebook business page to market your personal brand and engage your audience?