Are you branding yourself as much as you’re branding a business? Perhaps you are a creative leader, an educator or a mentor in your field and you’ve had a lot of people searching for you and adding you as ‘friend’ but you weren’t sure they fell into this category and felt like your personal privacy was no longer in your control. If this is you, then read on.
Facebook believes they’ve solved this for you with the new Subscribe feature, which allows people that don’t really know you, but know about you and want to follow what you’re up to to follow your updates. Typically if you are using Facebook for any commercial gain, you must create a business page per Facebook terms of use, but if you are simply updating people with announcements and news type content this could be a good solution for you. To enable this feature, watch this short slideshare on the steps to enable this feature.
Once you’ve enabled this, do all the obvious things to build your subscriber list:
1. Ask people to subscribe to you. – Get all your old client lists, all of those business cards from your training sessions, etc. and send out emails. Post this on your Facebook business page, even get some Facebook advertisements started. Your friends that you’ve already added will already be ‘subscribed’ by default, so no point in posting this on your profile.
2. Ensure your profile is searchable – If you are going to market yourself as a brand, you need to be visible. Make sure that your personal account privacy settings allow for you to be found in a Facebook search.
3. Train people to subscribe, not add as friend – People will automatically go for the ‘Add as Friend’ button if you don’t train them otherwise. Consider making a profile image that says ‘Subscribe Now’ so people know to hit the subscribe button. You have about 600 pixels to create a longer profile image (this length is not advisable for business pages, but ok for a personal profile).
4. Create a calendar of ‘public’ posts – Since you are going to be building subscribers you need to come up with a list of regular posts to publish publicly for your professional followers. As soon as you enable the subscriber function, make sure to post a few things publicly so people can see something up-front as a taste of things to come.
5. Become familiar with your post security settings – If you want to use the subscribe functionality instead of a business page, you have to commit to being diligent in setting your security correctly on each and every post. If you are posting for your subscribers, make sure it is set to ‘public’ as shown below.
Remember that this is an alternative to using a business page as a person and depending on what you are trying to accomplish, you may want to setup a business page instead of going down the subscription route. The main question is – will you be posting promotional or sales-related items on Facebook? If the answer is yes, definitely setup a business page. If not, consider the subscription route if you can remember to always set your post privacy.
Author Bio: Valorie Reavis
Social Marketer, foodie, closet geekA marketing professional who has focused primarily on the hair and beauty business for of the past decade, Valorie now runs linkup marketing, a digital marketing agency for the hair and beauty professional. Valorie works to engage clients in the marketing process and help them successfully engage with their clients and community. Energetic and passionate about the industry, Valorie focuses on blending traditional and digital media in order to bring salons closer to their clients.
