All You Need Is Love

I always end my speaking engagements with this phrase. “All you need is love; we are all social beings.” This is the secret formula that makes social media marketing work for individuals and businesses, no matter how big they are now.

Here is the reason why love is important on Facebook:

There is no Love link or button on Facebook, only the Like link. But if you aim high—really high—you may just hit the Like with flying colors.

If your prospective fans are not ready for love, will they consider Liking your business?

I Like You a Lot

Do you remember your first love? Probably. But do you remember your first like? Most people don’t.

It might have been a GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip, Lincoln logs, Rock’em Sock’em Robots, a slinky dog, an Etch A Sketch, or a Radio Flyer wagon—brands that have stuck in our minds for years.

The same happens on Facebook. After people Like you, they may forget you unless you give them something to love about your business.

How do you do that on Facebook? You’ve got to have dialogue with people and poll them.

Let’s say you own a kayak store, and you do rentals and tours. You’ve started a Facebook Fan page and you have 500 fans, but it’s been the same 500 people for the last year. Yeah, it’s a good group of regulars, but it’s just not growing.

Another one of your hobbies is photography. One night you decide to take the camera out and photograph the stars from your kayak. You do a time lapse and create a video out of the photos over a period of 4 hours. You post this to your Facebook page that night and go to bed.

The next morning when you wake up, your fans have grown from 500 to 2,500. Not only has the number of people grown, but they are all talking about the photos and sharing the link to the photos with all of their friends. Topics on your Fan page turn from just being about kayaks to astronomy, photography, film, and hot dates. Your business and your Fan page just went from a like to a love.

People will only take like to the next level if emotion is involved. You need to excite and inspire people for them to love your business.

It Takes Time and Commitment

Getting people to love your Fan page is going to take some time and constant effort. It’s not necessarily going to happen overnight with a single campaign.

Make sure you give yourself a realistic time period—at least three months—before you evaluate the performance of your Facebook marketing. Six months is an even better time period depending on the amount of effort you put into your campaigns. After one full year, you should be rocking out to Facebook marketing and achieving a large fan base with an interactive audience.

It’s also going to take a strategic plan, the right training for your team, and being immersed in Facebook marketing and actions with the right voice and presence. The great thing is that you should now have the tools to put all of these together.

Within your Facebook marketing plan, objectives and platforms will change and you will need to adjust. Remain agile enough to do this—because it is certain that Facebook will change.

Love Is Patient, Love Is Kind

Your objective is to get fans to love your business on Facebook. You already know that this is going to take some time, but don’t fret; get going right now, as soon as you put down this book.

All of the tips in this book will help you gain an edge over many other businesses on Facebook that simply fly by the seat of their pants and perform ad-hoc marketing. And in order to really gain the attention of fans and become that likeable and loveable source, be kind.

Kindness is the only thing that has ever changed the world.

The Least You Need to Know