Social Media and Independent Agencies - Building Your Page and Attracting Fans. Part III in a Series

So now you are ready to actually begin using Facebook for business purposes, and you are wondering, "What exactly do I do?" To follow will be a number of specific suggestions on how to get “fans” of your page. Of course, the importance of getting people to be fans of your page is so that you can easily and effectively communicate with them at a later time.

For starters, you will need to create your agency’s Facebook page. This is a really simple process. Instead of taking up space in this blog, suffice it to say that millions of people have figured it out, and you can too. If you need a slight nudge and a point in the right direction, then do a simple Google search for “how to build my business a Facebook page”, or go to any other organization’s Facebook page, and all the way down on the bottom left of the screen, there will be a link titled "Create a Page for my Business". Click there and you will be off and running.

When building your page, you'll want to include photos and information about your agency. Most of this information can be pulled off of your agency’s existing web site, so this part will not be much work at all. You may even want to add a statement about your agency’s service standards and mission statement. Do a Facebook search for “insurance agency” and you'll see a number of good examples. My agent's Facebook page is linked below.

Once you have your page built, you'll want to start promoting it within your community. Your first strategy should be to get as much "organic" growth as possible. Get your employees and family members to become "fans" of your new page. Ask them to promote it to their friends, especially those that are clients of the agency. You'll also want to include messages on your emails and other correspondences that leave your office that state something to the effect that "You can now follow us on Facebook". Putting a direct link on your website so that your visitors can easily follow you on Facebook is also a good idea. By taking these simple steps, you will quickly have a nice number of fans and a steady flow of new fans as well.

Doing an ad buy on Facebook is also very easy, and is perhaps the best money you can spend given your ability to target a specific type of prospect and set your own budget. For example, let’s say you have an agency in Athens, Georgia. You may only want to advertise to people that are logging into their Facebook account that are within 25 miles of Athens. Because the Facebook server knows the IP address of the computers logging into its site, it is able to discern the location of each person on the site and target advertising to a specific location. Pretty cool, huh?

But wait, there’s more. Let’s say that you don’t think that advertising to UGA students is effective marketing, because you feel that the majority of them are not yet insurance purchasers, but instead rely on mom and dad to buy the insurance. It would be very easy to filter out the majority of those students by choosing to only advertise to people within 25 miles of Athens that are age 25 or over and either engaged or married. There are a number of other criteria that you could use to either further limit or expand those persons whom your ad will target. Now, that’s not exactly something you can do with the phone book or newspaper advertising.

While the ability to target very specific demographics with Facebook advertising is awesome, it may take a back seat to the financial flexibility. Once you have set up the perimeters of your ad, Facebook will give you two suggested bid prices. One price will be for “impressions”, or how many times your ad is shown; and the other price will be for “clicks”, or how many times your ad is clicked on by a Facebook user. While the price per click will be higher, I suggest that you take that approach, as my experience is the click through rate for insurance agencies is quite low (about once per 1000 impressions).

I am not going to pretend to understand how Facebook sets the price for its ads. Let’s just say that it’s on some type of formula. An agency that I helped to set up an ad for last week was given the suggested price of $0.52 for each click. They had committed $100/month to Facebook advertising. We set the daily budget at $3.12, thinking that would allow us 6 clicks per day. If the agency maxed out each and every day, then they would hit close to their monthly budget. So, isn’t this beautiful? Their ad is going to show up only to the people that are in their geographic area, that meet the demographic profile they have set up, and once they have exhausted their daily budget, the ad shuts itself off and the agency does not have to pay for it any longer. Wow!

It has been less than one week since we placed the ad, and the agency has had 46,596 impressions and 39 clicks. All of this for grand total of $15.13. Turns out that $0.52 is the MOST the agency will ever pay for a click, and the average click price has been considerably less. Where else could $15 generate that number of impressions with your most desirable (however you define that) demographic?

Okay, so now you’ve got your page, and your getting some fans. The next and final article in this series will take a look at the content you chould place on your page. Stay tuned.