Marketing Your Small Business using Facebook:  Do You Like Me?

What motivates someone to "like" your Facebook company page?  According to a poll by CoTweet and ExactTarget, respondents said they like pages for the following reasons:

40% to receive discounts
39% to show support of a company to their friends
36% to get a "freebie"
34% to remain informed about a company
33% for updates about future products
30% for updates on sales

Your corporate social media strategy is vital.  You can lose a customer quickly with the wrong approach on Facebook.  Winning a loyal customer begins with matching a great product or service with a flawless and repeatable customer experience.  The customer experience includes many components.  Here are a couple that I highly recommend:

Personalization:  Are you using the information your customers give you to get to know them as individuals?  What devices to they shop through, what deals are they most interested in, and when they don't complete a purchase, do you know why, so you can fix it the next time?

Devices: Shopping is no longer an in-store or PC-centric experience.  A record number of people are shopping through mobile devices.  Customers demand an experience that isn't just compelling, but consistent across all devices. 

Meeting the needs of your customer puts you in a position to ask them to become a Facebook fan (if they haven't already done so).  You then have a new customer-engagement channel populated with people who you can entice on a daily (or weekly) basis with deals and personalized information.

These fans can evolve into the ultimate marketing prize - brand advocates!  According to Nielson, 90 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations.  That's the type of Facebook fan you should aim for.