Facebook as a business ecosystem
Recently I've been noticing how quickly facebook is becoming an amazing hub for business. Have you?
at the heart of this trend is the fact that authenticity in entrepreneurship, business and our personal lives is COALESCING into one identity.
It's much harder today for someone to portray a respectable corporate type on weekdays and a party animal on the weekend posting druken pics on facebook believing it won't haunt with their professional career. I would say that living a double life today is infinitely more difficult than in years before. You may be thinking that this is the end of weekend fun but it's not, in fact this is an amazing opportunity for all of us.
Put yourSelf out there and integrate authenticity into your brand
Some of my personal heroes are really hitting this step home further than anyone else at the moment. By promoting every facet of their lives to facebook and social media people like Gary V. and Grant Cardone promote themselves transparently to boost their overall brand and ultimately attract more business. This has come in the form of facebook groups, pages, slack channels and all sorts of other platforms being used as their primary point of contact.
This is in stark contrast to the more traditional way of promoting a website, I mean they probably do have websites but I rarely look because everything I need is always there on Facebook. All of their content and communications takes place inside facebook via their personal page, via their fan page, via their group, and more often than not with the help of a chatbot.
Facebook is constantly innovating their platforms - always be the first to utilise the tools
Facebook continues to keep adding layers of functionality for operating a business to entice customers and users. The rise of Facebook messenger (particularly bots) has been particularly amazing. Every brand and person should be using bots right now as a communication or sales tool to some extent, I've personally been seeing amazing results.
Above I made an infographic of what I think is one of my most effective funnels utilising bots and a few other facebook features. This is what I call the facebook sales funnel / business ecosystem.
- Top of the funnel you have you usual facebook content that you would promote through a few boosted ads to get the content out there.
- Next stop you hook up a bot to your content so when a user comments on the post they are automatically sent a message to engage them further with your content.
- Got them onboard so now you can start sending even more content or deals to them through scheduled posts in the bot - this will lead to higher engagement rates.
- Further down the funnel you can begin to convert daily users into paying customers via the bot or links to other products.
How is that for a simple sales funnel utilising the increasing functionality of Facebook? Pretty good if I do say so myself.
the one stop shop for your business from ACQUISITION to conversion
Your entire business can now run on facebook with your market research, users, shop and checkout all in one tidy little platform. At its current trend Messenger and similar platforms will essentially replace email as an ancient form of contact. Messaging platforms are versatile and instant with dozens of use cases depending on the business you are running. It's even more handy if you have a couple of brands to manage as you can coordinates strategies on the fly straight out of your pocket. With manychat you can even add additional bots to your portfolio giving each page you have its own responsive bot.
For creating content he add ons are up to you, my focus is on live video. Recently there was a Kickstarter for a camera product called MeVo which has been a great tool for creating great content on the spot. MeVo utilises FB Live by being able to stream live straight from the camera into your smart phone You can also integrate with other video streaming services like crowdcast.io if FB Live isn't your thing.
For the e-commerce side of my FB business you can integrate with your Shopify account to communicate with users about their orders and ship tracking if you sell physical products. However there are sill some bugs with the Shopify bot that could potentially mess up other bots already loaded in. So you've been warned and be careful but as an alternative you could use jumper.ai or add book n bloom for a service based business.
The best thing you can do is start today and get your hands dirty
I should give a few disclaimers though as I have hit a few bumps trying to market bots efficiently. Paid advertising has been patchy at best as users see the "Message Us" button as the call to action and hesitate to click. I'm pretty sure this is due to a phobia of contacting a direct human rather than getting that instant response the bot provides. One solution to this so far is to drive users to your page where they engage with other content that will prompt a bot response, like commenting on a post or photo.
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