Creating Niches
To market effectively to the various segments within your target, consider placing them into niches. Niches are different than segments on Facebook in that they allow you to dive further into specific attributes.
Breaking your customers down even further enables you to create marketing messages and conversations tailored to each niche. Dividing your segments into niches may seem tedious now, but it will pay off.
 | DEFINITION |
Niches are subsets of a target market segment.
The health-care finance example from earlier in this chapter identified three market segments: CFOs, mid-level professionals, and entry-level employees. Because all of their needs are so different, you might want to set up different Facebook pages for each of them. If you present your information to all of them on a single page, a lot of that information won’t apply to a big chunk of your audience, and you will begin to lose fans. You have to remain focused to retain fans. You can use the status tool to customize who the message appears to, but if your messages are regularly posted and segmented for large amounts of people, this can be very tedious.
Defining Niches on Facebook
It’s easy to say that everyone in the world is a potential customer, but you already know that such a scattershot approach isn’t the most effective way to market yourself on Facebook. Instead, think about a commonality among your potential customers that you can use to define a niche.
For example, suppose you run a web design business. Looking back at your projects for the past year, you see that most of your customers for the last month have been stay-at-home moms. Another commonality is that all of the websites you designed in December were for restaurants. And yet another commonality is that 80 percent of your business is with nonprofits. You’ve just identified three prime niches: stay-at-home moms, restaurants, and nonprofits.
Depending on the size of these niches and how much business they can bring in, you just might want to consider creating three separate Facebook Groups that focus on these areas and invite individuals in these niches to join these groups. (For details on creating Facebook Group pages, see Chapter 8.)
 | WATCH OUT |
Be careful not to group too many people with different interests into one area on Facebook. It dilutes the effectiveness of the conversation.
To Niche or Not to Niche
If you have a smaller audience of a hundred people, you may not need to niche at all, at least at first. But as you grow your Facebook presence, you may find that the topics you discuss aren’t engaging large percentages of the fans who frequent your page. If this goes on for too long, people will leave. You want to start creating niches before you lose your audience.
After you define your niches, you need to fill them with the appropriate customers to make loyal fans. Facebook provides many ways to fill your niches with the appropriate people, including the following:
• Discussing the topics that matter to the niche
• Building niche pages or groups (see Chapters 7 and 8)
• Running targeted ads (see Chapter 15)
• Conducting questions (see Chapter 3)
• Using the Facebook search tool (see next section)
Searching for People on Facebook
If you know the names of people you want to include in your niche, you can search for them on Facebook and message them. To search for people by name, type the name in the Search box that appears at the top of every Facebook page (see Figure 2.2). If there are multiple users with the same name, a list appears identifying users by their city and state. If you don’t see the person you’re looking for on that list, click See More Results at the bottom of the page.
Figure 2.2: Search for people by simply typing in their names.
When you find the person you’re looking for, you can send him a message by clicking the Message button at the top right of the page to invite him to your Facebook page or simply communicate with him (see Figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3: Click the Message button to send a note.
| WATCH OUT |
Be careful about contacting too many people you don’t know using the Facebook Message tool. Facebook frowns on this method because spammers use this tactic to find, friend, and fan people they don’t know. If you do this too often, Facebook will ban you from using the Message tool or requesting friends for a certain period of time.