For the past month a new client has asked me to help them with their Facebook Fan page. The client is a local restaurant/coffee shop and their Fan Page has been up since last summer. When Ben and I first connected their page had 105 fans and not much interaction from those fans. The last post was in December, so they hadn’t been doing much to drive engagement. Their Twitter account was linked to status updates, but they were only being followed by 3 people. So Twitter was a like talking to yourself.
Together we developed a strategy with the overarching goal to drive more business into the shop. My role would be to engage fans through regular posts. Since we started the fan base has grown to 170 and engagement rating (via FB Insights) is up to 18.4. Not bad considering we’d had 55 inches snow over that same period. Ben was pleased with the results, but with the weather situation we couldn’t really tell if overall revenue had been impacted. It was time to test the fan base. Are they customers, or mostly friends and family?
We wanted to accomplish several things:
- See if fans are coming to the shop
- Give them something to make it worth the effort
- Give them something they could share with others, creating word of mouth advertising
- Do it all on a budget of $20, including the cost of the giveaway.
The plan was to give away free coffee if you proved you were a Facebook fan. The proof—bring in the Fan Page. All you had to do was print it out. That was cheap for us.
Next was what to give away that could be shared. Instead of giving away 1 cup of coffee, we decided to give each fan 4 cups. Coffee is easy to share, and when you show up somewhere with coffee for others, you really make their day. That was the impetus for the theme of the event—Be a Hero.
A week before the giveaway I started doing hero oriented status updates in addition to the other posts. The event was Monday and Tuesday this week. Results? Two fans brought the page in. Yeah, disappointing. But there is hope for the impact it can create. One fan was a regular customer. The other was from the post office. He’d never been in before, and he left with coffee for himself and 3 to share. The post office is a pretty big platform for seeing locals, and it’s on the other end of the parking lot from the shop. They have the same target market walking into their store front. It will take time to see if there’s any impact, and we may never know. I’ll keep you posted.
We still have the same problem—driving up revenue. Any suggestions on getting fans to visit the shop, or getting people to visit the shop to engage as fans?
Relationships Drive Business 