Facebook is a great place to start or participate in online communities based around your interior design service. Use Facebook as one of the ways to increase your business.
BUT “What are the pitfalls?”. “What mistakes do interior designers make?”
1. Facebook Groups: These are a way to communicate with people with like-minded interests, join the same groups that your customers might or start your own group. The problems here are that you end up talking to your competitors or trawling through voluminous amounts of irrelevant comments and receiving lots of spam. The mistake is to join too many groups that are not really relevant to your business intentions.
2. Vanity URL. One common mistake here is NOT obtaining a vanity URL for your business on Facebook. What is a vanity URL? Well ours is www.facebook.com/kothea , you want one like that.
3. You are foresighted enough to write a blog to support your business. However you copy and past your blog to your Facebook page (when you remember). Use Facebook apps to automate this process eg Social RSS
4. You do not clearly display your contact details. You do not have a ‘call to action’ throughout the page. Think what a visitor would want from you next…and provide it.
5. You only put text on your blog. Spruce it up with photos and videos if you can.
6. You only use Facebook. Use it in conjunction with other tools like Twitter.
7. Thinking it is the same as linkedin. It’s not. Facebook is a place where you will more likely be able to reach your customer base more easily.
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- Interior Designers – What Should I write About On My Blog (kothea.com)
- 10 Reasons Why You Should Hire an Interior Designer (kothea.com)
- How do you explain INTERIOR DESIGN to a 6 year old boy? (kothea.com)
- The Business Bible For Interior Designers (kothea.com)
This is a nice article for you to share with interior designers. Question… I checked out your FB fan page and am wondering what are examples of the call to actions you are referring to?
Thanks for the info!
Hi. There are links on the “extended info” tab on our facebook page. That is now set as the default page on http://www.facebook.com/kothea. That page has links prompting further action. Also on the left hand bar are links prompting further action. We’re not 100% happy with where we are on and we will be working on it by adding additional buttons and other whizzy bits. FB is quite tricky to get it to work and look as you would like.
Thanks. It’s always good to be reminded about the “Call to action” when there are so many details to think about. PS… Your FB page is looking great!
It is also worth using FBTML to make your page look as good as it can. This is particularly useful if you can create a consistent visual feel with your main site.
Also think carefully about how you link between your site and Facebook. It is all too easy to get caught up in building a huge fan list. Fans are nice to have but they’re not the same thing as customers.
Thanks Ruben. How do you add buttons and the like to the left hand bar? (“We use extended info” app for the main info section and do use some ML in there)