Facebook for Business – Episode 26 Transcript

 

Mark S. Hey everyone and welcome to the Episode 26 of the Custom Apparels Startups podcast my name is Mark Stephenson.

Mark V. And I am Marc Vila.

Mark S. And Episode 26, the podcast is now old enough to start worrying about how drunk their friends are all the time, that’s really kind of that age where we are looking around at other podcasts wondering why don’t they have a regular job that’s kind of a thing.

Mark V. Well, I guess we are sticking with the age theme for here, are we doing this forever?

Mark S. Until we get to that age where we don’t remember things so well and then we’ll work on that.

Mark V. Okay. (laughs) What if we get to like 120, at that point in time I think the age jokes will be beyond that.

Mark S. We’ll have to find something else, I might agree.

Mark V. We’ll get there. Well, today we are here to talk about Facebook.

Mark S. Facebook do’s and don’ts as a matter of fact.

Mark V. Yeah the do’s and don’ts of Facebook, what does that mean, we’re talking about should you have a Facebook page for your business, what should and shouldn’t you do.

Mark S. I think in a lot of the podcasts that we have done and the webinars and honestly just about everybody that we talk to were constantly talking about Facebook marketing and referring people to Facebook and sending people to our own Facebook pages and Facebook groups and we kind of wanted to bring all of you up to speed with what Facebook is, what it can do for your business and how to go about it.

Mark V. Yeah and I would like to start off just to go on the record to say that I like Facebook.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Facebook on a personal level can have its annoyances, it can have its ups and downs, its things that you like or don’t, you don’t have to be a heavy personal Facebook user to recognize that it could be good for your business though.

Mark S. Right and just so you know Facebook is… I don’t know right now if it is as the most checked thing on the internet but a huge percentage of the population even if it might not be you the first thing that they do when they roll out of the bed in the morning is they pick up their Smartphone and they check their Facebook feed.

Mark V. Absolutely, people are checking their Facebook feeds before their E-mail now, the only thing that might be above that might be direct text messages or phone-calls that you’ve missed, otherwise that’s basically the next thing and I think we should maybe define a few things about Facebook because some people -they don’t want to be on Facebook coz they don’t want everybody to see all of their stuff.

Mark S. Right so lets divide things up a little bit, there are three plus -there are three main things that you can do on Facebook, you can have a Facebook profile and this is your personal page, this is where you get the opportunity to connect with friends and family to talk about what movies you like and what you hate and gossip about your friends -all that stuff happens on your profile.

Mark V. And you have to have that to be able to move forward on any of these other things.

Mark S. Yes, You don’t have to use it but you physically have to setup a personal Facebook profile to do anything on Facebook.

Mark V. Correct and another thing to mention on that -going back to my point in the beginning about people seeing your things is, there are privacy settings that you can adjust if you go to settings and privacy, you can essentially have it that nobody can see anything and not even search for you online unless you physically reach out to them.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. So you don’t have to necessarily load up all of your pictures and information and have it out there so that everybody can see, you can keep it really private and tight and only allow those in that you want to, if you choose to do that.

Mark S. Agreed, now one thing that I did that Facebook dislikes is I setup a separate Facebook profile for a business personas, so I have my own personal Facebook page that I really use to keep in touch with friends and family and then I setup kind of a business only Facebook profile and all that took really is a separate E-mail address.

Mark V. Yeah and if they listen to this, they might delete that.

Mark S. It could happen. But honestly if Facebook is listening to our podcast then we’ve made it and I no longer need that Facebook page.

Mark V. But it is important to note that not necessarily diving too deep into the do’s and don’ts now but you have to be a real person to have a Facebook page -meaning that if you name your Facebook page Bling Boutique as your first name and your last name you run a high risk of Facebook just removing your page because that is not the name of a person or a person.

Mark S. A Facebook profile has to be a real person.

Mark V. Correct. So a profile needs to be you.

Mark S. Right, the difference is now in a Facebook page -a page is a business or an organization.

Mark V. Yes.

Mark S. So if you setup your own Facebook profile like I have “Mark J Stephenson” is my Facebook profile and then Facebook pages I have several.

I run the ColDesi ink Facebook page.

The older Swfe Facebook page.

And those are all pages for individual businesses or organizations.

Mark V. And you can have many of those. Obviously as you mentioned I don’t know if there is a particular limit.

Mark S. There is not.

Mark V. You are not going to hit it if there is a limit. So with your business you can choose to segment out how many pages you do or don’t need, but we’re going to be talking about one.

Mark S. Most people just need one and especially if you are just getting into business or if you are a new apparel decorator, unless you have a really well developed multi faceted corporation then you probably just going to use the one Facebook page for your business.

Mark V. Yeah absolutely, absolutely and that’s what we will focus on this one is the one page that you have maybe or maybe not towards the end we could talk about why you would have multiples but this is more of a getting into it than nuts and bolts of what you need to do on Facebook.

Mark S. We don’t always call those correctly, your profile is a personal page, a page is a business page but we interchange those conversationally. So from now on when we talk about your Facebook page unless we say your personal Facebook page we are talking about your business, okay? And the last thing that Facebook does is Facebook has groups and some of you maybe part of our Custom Apparel Startups Facebook group, but a group is kind of like a club, it is a club that can be based around your business or your particular interest.

Mark V. Yeah so we’ve talked about plenty of other podcasts before if you are into boats or horses or biking or running or golf or any of these things that you might be interested in.

Mark S. Pickles.

Mark V. Pickles, plain T-shirts so we’ve talked about all these things and there are Facebook groups out there that you can join or participate in, you can also start your own if it’s a Tampa bay pickled food lovers.

Mark S. Yeah, yeah I like that idea I think I am going to start that one.

Mark V. Yeah, so you can start your own group and we can get into that on whether or not if you need to do that but that’s there it’s a club, you can start a club and you can join a club on Facebook just like in real life.

Mark S. Yeah. So there you go, when we talk about all of the marketing things that we talked about in past podcasts, one of the big things for increasing word of mouth locally and online is to join a group or a club or participate in online organizations like meetups and things like that, Facebook groups fall into that category.

Mark V. Yeah, absolutely, starting off, setting it up.

Mark S. Yes. Well, first of all I want to talk about when you should not open a Facebook page.

Mark V. Okay, yes.

Mark S. Coz not everybody should, I know everybody might want to and we might want you to setup a Facebook page but you should not do that if you are just going to ignore it.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. You can’t just put up a Facebook page and then never go back.

Mark V. And we’re speaking specifically your business page that putting it up there and ignoring it is going to allow for a few things for one if folks do find you on there they are going to question if you’re still in business or how serious you are about business if you are dormant. If your last post was from 2012, you are immediately going to lose some trust and faith in your business because you’ve abandoned that page.

Mark S. Yes and if you are in a market where you have competitors that find your page, if you are not looking at it then they will use it, so for example if you’ve got a Tampa screen printing Facebook page -other screen printers are here in Tampa, if you are not going to post on your own Facebook page then they can.

Mark V. Yeah, they can and they can interact with people on your page.

Mark S. Say ‘Hi’ to your customers for example.

Mark V. Yeah exactly, so you want to make sure that you are going to be prepared to interact and use it to some degree and we can go into plenty of details on that but you have to go in there and plan to use it and not abandon it, because you will end up … there will be spam that will land on your page, you can choose to remove that if you are actively involved, if not you’re going to be sending people to weight loss pill pages on your page when some spam lands on them.

Mark S. And you may or may not want to do that, depends on your demographic.

Mark V. So you got that and I think that to me that’s the number one.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. If you are going to ignore it -don’t do it, anything else there is always a… there is some sort of… maybe-want if possibilities and there is all other rules that you can break but I think that if you are going to break that rule then don’t have it.

Mark S. Agreed, so do we want to talk about more reasons why you might not?

Mark V. If you would like to mention a couple now we could also dive into them as we are talking about the other stuff.

Mark S. Yeah, then let’s do that.

Mark V. Okay, this way we don’t forget.

Mark S. Lets talk about -i think next on our list is setting up a page. Is that right?

Mark V. Yeah, setting up. I’d like to first just go right into that, you have to have a personal page first.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. You have to have a profile.

Mark S. And we don’t care what’s on that profile.

Mark V. And that doesn’t matter, do whatever you want with that, however I will make one recommendation if you are going to post a lot onto Facebook of your personal things no matter what it is -good or bad, pictures of your kids, your health, your family -when you are going on vacation.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. If you are posting a lot of personal things about your life, my personal recommendation is to go on to the privacy settings and put it on private, because you are going to start a business page and you are going to give the potential for people to click on you and see your information.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. And you don’t necessarily want people that you are doing business with to have access to all of your personal stuff.

Mark S. Yeah you know it’s funny I am friends with a local couple that own a real estate company and they actually moved because for a long time they had a public profile and everyone knew where they lived and they would get people showing up at their house on Saturday morning asking if they could take em around and see houses.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. So, you don’t want that, you just don’t.

Mark V. You don’t want that and however this comes into the exception things, if you don’t post a lot on your personal page or all of your posting is kind of your business stuff anyways.

Mark S. Then it doesn’t matter.

Mark V. Then you can leave it open and you could have a degree of transparency towards your customers where they can click and read about you -but you want to be careful that you are not saying “Hey guys I’m going on vacation next week” meaning that you just told everyone of your customers that you are going to be out of your house, which you post all the time, pictures of the neighborhood.

Mark S. Here it is, look at the safe that I just bought and where I store all my money.

Mark V. That’s stuff for your friends. That’s even Facebook and even Mark Zuckerberg says it and I talk about Mark Zuckerberg -he is the head honcho for Facebook by the way.

Mark S. Yes, He is the head hoodie.

Mark V. Head hoodie, he says whenever you read and watch and talk about Facebook, it is always a place for friends, so remember what you put on your profile is for your friends for real friends and people you know and everything else is for everybody else including acquaintances and business associates.

Mark S. Yup agreed.

Mark V. So setting up.

Mark S. Yes. When you setup a Facebook page for your business, some of the most important things you do right away, and we’ve done a couple of podcasts on SEO and local SEO search engine and getting found online basically. And one of the ways that you’ll get found on Facebook or your business is going to get found is by filling out every single part of your Facebook profile and that includes things like the about us section. So basically I am going to go to my Facebook and I am just going to go to the ColDesi page and I am going to take a look here and look across the top you’re going to see your timeline which is just what everyone will see and that is what just it says it is a timeline of events and posts and comments and then there is the about section and if you look there are things like: Name of the page, the website address for your page, when your business was started? Your address, your hours There is a place for a short description of your business and a long description of your business and you are going to want to do both of those because they show up in different ways and different places.

Mark V. And I think that you should spend a lot of time on this, this is just one of those things where you can start a Facebook page for your business in three minutes?

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. But I think you should dedicate an hour to it. You don’t have to use the whole hour but I think that if you are going to do this, you’re going to do it probably once right and then you’re just going to edit it from there.

Mark S. I agree, so maybe when you setup you should think about it like it’s Your web page.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. Like it’s your company webpage because in a lot of cases it is, because many of our customers use this instead of a webpage.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. You can put your Facebook page address on a business card and people now find that perfectly acceptable.

Mark V. Yeah, and it is great for all the reasons that we’re going to talk about but you should write it all out, you can write it ahead of time in a word document even if you want but write it all out, read it through again, I recommend if you are not great at grammar or spelling or any of these things have a friend who is a teacher read it for you.

Mark S. Absolutely.

Mark V. That’s extremely important to do. You want to sound like a nice professional business owner, no matter how or what niche market you go after, if it’s profanity T-shirts you still don’t want broken up sentences and horrible English on it.

Mark S. Because remember this is some place where Google serves up Facebook pages in their search results and so does Bing, so this is how they do that, this is how they find you and you want to make sure that its coherent enough for Google to read. You also want to make sure that throughout this you use words and phrases that relate to your business.

So for example in the short description: if you are a Bling Boutique -then you want to say things “Hey the Bling Boutique makes terrific custom bling T-shirts, we make rhinestone T-shirts for cheerleaders, we make spangle pants for dance schools” Put the kind of things that you do in your business because that’s what when people search, those are the people you want to find.

Mark V. Yeah, rhinestone jackets, we use rhinestuds for menswear; write all these little things that you do in nice clear detail.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. as much as possible, think about it, re-read it, have somebody else read it -do it again but fill it up, I also think you should include things like: A community that you live in beyond just the city, similar to how it’s like on a webpage.

Mark S. Okay, I like that.

Mark V. For example we are in Tampa and in Tampa there is Carol wood in South Tampa and Palma Ceia.

Mark S. All the little neighborhoods.

Mark V. You also might live, you might live in Peoria, Illinois which is (I believe that’s the name of the place), which is right by Chicago, I think it is a suburb, if that’s wrong I’m sorry, but I think that’s right.

Mark S. We live in Florida so…

Mark V. But you could live in lutes Florida, but you should put Tampa Florida as well, you should use the pull of the metropolitan area.

Mark S. Yeah, because no-one else lives there, so if you live in a very small town -use the next biggest town.

Mark V. Yeah and both, use both.

Mark S. Yeah, right.

Mark V. So you could say, Bling Boutique in lute’s Florida serving all of the Tampa bay area including Carol Wood…

Mark S. St. Petersburg, yeah all of that.

Mark V. So put that information in there, if you are going to service those areas. Dont put St. Pete if you’re going to want to turn away customers because it is a 45 minute drive and you don’t want to bother.

Mark S. Agreed, so that’s all part of thinking out what you’re going to say, the next thing you’re going to want to look at is the product’s tab, because it says business page they would want to know what you do, so this is the place to list once again those products that you deal with, so if you do screen printing and embroidery for example then you’re going to want to say “Custom Embroidery Corporate Logos, Corporate Wear, Screen Printed T-shirts, Family reunion shirts” Just list everything that you could possibly sell.

Mark V. Yeah and if you have niche businesses that you particularly deal with often, so if you specialize in say Sales person outside sales people and you deal with a lot of contractor type of businesses -you can list that type of stuff, you can say things like “we’re a premier dealer for uniforms and sales people wear for plumbing companies” and you can be as specific as you want because they give you a ton of room to write things.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. I also recommend separating things into paragraphs whenever possible, 10 sentences or less if it is one giant paragraph with 40 sentences you’re not going to get people to read more than the first 10.

Mark S. It is much easier to read in paragraph form or bullet points if you can use them.

Mark V. Yeah absolutely.

Mark S. And just a trick if you hit the enter key and instead of doing a character turn it actually like enters the document it say’s like “save?”

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. If you hold down the Alt key or the Ctrl key depending on the software it will actually let you create a new paragraph.

Mark V. Or the shift.

Mark S. Or the shift.

Mark V. You’re going to have to press all three.

Mark S. One of those.

Mark V. And I think that’s about it on the setup, another thing is -here is a big one, because this has nothing to do with setup, this is in general, if you are typing something really long into a website you have to be prepared that whatever you are typing in there can disappear at any moment and not get back.

Mark S. Oh, good one.

Mark V. Okay so.

Mark S. Do it in Word or something first.

Mark V. That’s what I mentioned, write it into word copy and paste it in, when you do copy and paste you might lose some of your formatting, you might lose paragraph, the character type and bullet points then you can edit it in there.

Mark S. Agreed.

Mark V. But if you just spend 35 minutes writing 300 words, you’re going to be really upset when you go to click save and the page refreshes and now it is empty.

Mark S. Good one. Alright so there are a couple of more things for setup

If you go to a Facebook page while you are listening to this if you can, ColDesi inc. (Col Desi INC) is a good one to go to, to take a look at, but you will notice that there are a couple of things, first of all there are tabs across the top that say timeline, about, photos, videos and there is some more buttons and you can actually manage tabs in there and add what you like across the top, which I like to do that a lot because some people want, they just want to see the pictures of your work, or they might just want to see a video that someone told them about. So put all that stuff in there but probably the one one of the most important things that people ignore is that there is also a button in the main profile picture that says… mine it says “Contact us” and if you click the little carrot there when you are logged in, it will actually let you edit that. So you could say shop now! If you have an online store, you could say “Call us” if you just want to lead to a page with your phone number, you could do just about anything.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. So use that call to action. Basically a CTA is what its called.

Mark V. And that should be again I always go into be as specific as you want on there, everything doesn’t have to be very generic.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. So if you want to have people sign up for an E-mail list or you want people to just check out your work on your own site because you’ve got more things there or you got a really cool webpage or people could shop online on your website or call you, whatever you want people to actually do when they land there, make it easy for them to do that.

Mark S. And clear.

Mark V. And clear, if you want people to call you then make sure your phone number is in a bunch of different places so they can easily find it. On the Colman & Company webpage, our phone number is the biggest text on our front page -right on the top.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. We encourage folks, just call us if you need us, if you want that you should make your phone number just as easy to find.

Mark S. if you don’t want that, do not put that in a visible place.

Mark V. Yeah, there you go.

Mark S. So the other thing that as I am looking at this page that the people ignore all the time and that is those top two images, there is a page image and a profile image, I never want you to ignore these things, it is part of that preparation process, the small picture on the page is 180 pixels by a 180 pixels, put your company logo on there if you want to, if you are a recognizable person then put your face on there, put a sample of your work there but don’t leave it blank because whenever you post, on your own page or on somebody else’s page using your Facebook page as the origin then that’s what it’s going to show, it is kind of like your authored image, you want that to be identifiable.

Mark V. And there is some don’ts here, don’t use a such a low resolution or small version of your logo that it’s pixilated.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. Don’t use a stretched out version of your logo where it’s too tall or too wide and it doesn’t look right.

Mark S. Dont use your high school yearbook picture.

Mark V. Yes.

Mark S. I don’t care if that’s what you use on your personal profile. Although you really shouldn’t unless you just graduated from high school. Use a professional image; if you are going to use yourself then take a picture of yourself in business wear.

Mark V. Yeah and it also, well two things on that, one your kids are beautiful.

Mark S. I’m sure they are. I mean they might not be but I am sure they are.

Mark V. And your grandkids are wonderful.

Mark S. They are I know that for a fact.

Mark V. But that picture should not be a picture of your grandkids unless they are maybe wearing something specifically you made and it fits a lot.

Mark S. Don’t go out of your way for that.

Mark V. I would still say don’t, even I want to retract that statement.

Mark S. Just never do.

Mark V. Just don’t do it, it has to be very special.

Mark S. I’m going to give you the only time that I would do that.

Mark V. Okay.

Mark S. That is if you are selling products that are specifically geared towards grandparents buying gifts for their grandchildren.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. I can see that as a market, you could do that. Like Number 1 grandma T-shirts.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. If that’s your main thing -go ahead.

Mark V. That’s what I was trying to go with that, we’re talking about your better off with just use your logo or a picture of your work or a picture of you and that’s a safer bet to play.

Mark S. So think about that, think about that small image as how you want to identify your company in a way that will make you the most money.

Mark V. Yeah, absolutely and if you sell, T-shirts that have a particularly offensive things on it then there is no problem to have a picture of you wearing an offensive T-shirts sitting on the hood of your mustang or something like that.

Mark S. Yeah, flipping everybody off.

Mark V. Then that’s you and that’s who you’re trying to sell to, but if you are doing general business wear a professional thing and have a friend or somebody take a nice head-shot of you that looks good or just put your logo if you don’t like pictures or something.

Mark S. I agree and then that brings us to the big picture, for example for our Page image for ColDesi -we have a picture once a year we do staff photo and we put that up there, I put that up there on most of our pages, because we want to remind people that there are people working here. We are a very personal company just like Marc Vila and I are sitting here talking to you directly, that’s the kind of thing we do, we are not IBM or Apple or Google where we don’t want to be identified with the person on the other end of the phone or the other end of the E-mail. So that’s why we use that image specifically.

Mark V. And with that, you want to follow the same rules if the image, you wouldn’t want to use a stretched image of people where people won’t look right, you don’t want to use something where its fuzzy or its out of focus unless you are trying to do some sort of artsy thing with it but generally speaking you want a nice clear image this can be something that if you do graphics great! Then you can make it look great, if not it doesn’t cost a lot to even pay somebody to help you.

Mark S. Its true you could do that, you could take a picture of your shop if it’s particularly clean and impressive, if you’ve got a couple of great embroidery machines and you’ve got some customer work laying out on a table, those are reasonable things to put in there.

Mark V. Yeah, absolutely, pictures of your work, pictures of you with your work, pictures of your shop, your sign.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Even if it’s your logo with some nice background you don’t have to go crazy.

Mark S. I was going to go through all of the different picture sizes and things like that here, but you guys can research that, I want you to get used to working with Facebook, so I want you to Google or Bing or whatever you do Facebook image sizes and it will tell you how many pixels wide and how many pixels deep that all of these images should be.

Mark V. And there is plenty of tips on this and then after you do it, one due that you want to do is look at it on the computer make sure it looks nice there, Get on your phone and look at it on the phone because there is a lot of clever and funny things that people do with those images and make the images interact with each other.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. There is a lot of clever things that you can do, then you look at it on the phone and it could look foolish or bad or sloppy or doesn’t look right. So look at it on both and make sure that what you want to portray comes through on both.

Mark S. And I’ll tell this short thing that I heard on the radio -just the other day.

Mark V. Sure.

Mark S. Mark Zuckerberg the hooding in-charge of Facebook started refusing to talk to people anything about Facebook unless he was talking about mobile. Because he doesn’t see any future in Facebook desktop or a very small one, so when you do anything on Facebook you really do need to check it on your phone and make sure it looks good.

Mark V. So you’ve set up, you put a nice paragraph of information whatever contact information you want to share you’ve got some nice images, you’ve got all this stuff going on, so now you’ve got a Facebook page for your business that’s ready to go.

Mark S. Yeah, its all setup.

Mark V. So what’s next, what’s the next step here?

Mark S. What the heck do you do with it? That’s really it, what do you do with the business Facebook page? When I first started in business I have no idea.

So here are the do’s and don’ts of actually using Facebook. I would like to start with the don’ts.

Mark V. Okay, let’s do it. Let’s go right into it.

Mark S. Okay, Don’t have… we kind of talked about don’t ignore it, so I just want to reiterate that, don’t setup a Facebook page and then never go back. We’re going to talk about that in a minute.

Don’t have Facebook tourettes.

Mark V. Okay.

Mark S. What that means, what I mean by that is your Facebook page should be free of your personal interests. Especially if they are extreme.

Mark V. Okay.

Mark S. Unless that’s part of your niche market. So let’s just say this, for example- like Marc said about the images if you run a business that caters to people that are buying filthy phrase T-shirts then it may be perfectly appropriate for you to cuss up a storm on your Facebook page, okay? But it might not be appropriate for you to explain your extreme political views, because those might not be the same market.

Mark V. Exactly if your market, another one to put say if your market is Tea party wear.

Mark S. Right, that’s not like to attend a tea party?

Mark V. No, the political party.

Mark S. The political party, the tea party, alright.

Mark V. Yeah the Tea party, so if that’s what you sell, so if you sell bunch of different T-shirts and hats and that’s all pro Tea party stuff then it is perfectly fine to maybe during that conversation you will bash the president or bash the other republican candidates or bash democratic, it might be okay to bash that and post this pro your party stuff, because you are pandering to your audience.

Mark S. That’s your audience.

Mark V. You are getting them fired up in a reason to want to buy the shirts. However if you sell to everybody and you are selling… like I mentioned before you sell a lot of things to contractors, and contractor sales people so you are selling polo shirts that are embroidered for the sales people and you are making patch uniform garments, if you are posting a bunch of political things there, you are going to alienate yourself from somebody who would have purchased from you.

Mark S. Right and remember the point of all this is to make money, so I am interested in doing business with people that I disagree with on almost everything.

Mark V. Sure.

Mark S. And if you are not willing to do that then don’t have a Facebook page or business.

Mark V. I think that was the point of what you were saying, if you are not willing to say “I don’t have to get into all of my personal views and share it everywhere I go” If you are not willing to do that… which is fine that’s your right to do that as well, you might say well, I don’t want to do business with somebody who disagrees with me there.

Mark S. So it could be that if you, maybe you are so politically motivated that you don’t want to do business with republicans, that’s a big part of the population in Florida for example or maybe you don’t like old folks for some reason, you want to constantly put Geriatric jokes on your page and you don’t care who sees it. You will turn people off… a certain portion of the population isn’t going to agree with you no matter what you say.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. So that’s why if you look at any of the ColDesi or Colman & Company properties, it is all about business and helping you get into business. It is not about what we did that weekend or how much we like or dislike what happened in the political debates, or what we think about that sermon that we heard in the Church over the weekend.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. It’s about business.

Mark V. It is about business and we can also talk about a don’t and a do is making jokes.

Mark S. Okay.

Mark V. So, if you make a joke, if it’s really-really light hearted, you are probably not going to offend anybody with a knock-knock joke. But if it’s not funny, then it doesn’t work at all.

Mark S. I’m pretty sure there are couple of comments that I’ve made throughout our podcast because I am snorky, I would’ve said differently if it wasn’t a live recording, you have the opportunity to do that on Facebook, you can look at what you are about to post and decide if it is really funny, is this going to tick off a potential customer because I am in this for money, not for funny.

Mark V. Wow…

Mark S. Did I just do that? That’s what you get in Episode 26; we’re starting to come into our own here.

Mark V. Before you post anything you can also just ask yourself if you are specially being really serious about it -is this post going to get me anything? Is this post going to provide me any positive, is there a potential for a negative and weight that out, it is your risk and reward thing, if you sell offensive T-shirts and you post a really offensive joke, it is probably going to be positive.

Mark S. Right. Because somebody is going to look for a T-shirt with that joke on.

Mark V. However if you are just selling straight corporate wear and you make kind of an off colored joke, you have to say “Is this going to actually do anything good for me?” and then you can just hit the delete. You can delete after you post.

Mark S. Or not, for example and this goes also if you participate in groups or forums online that might be tracked back to your business. For example we had one customer… not a customer but a member of the Customer Apparels Startups Facebook group, who posted a couple of times and used language which I think wasn’t appropriate for everyone in the group.

Mark V. Sure.

Mark S. And that’s the way I look at things, we want to be useful and we want to be appropriate. So I private messaged him and I said “look, you are welcomed to post here anytime, but really, we got a big audience with a lot of different kinds of people and we don’t allow profanity in the group.” And his response was “well I started my business so I could do whatever I want, So I just won’t participate.” And i’m like… that’s great! Congratulations on having that much control and not needing that extra money.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. So if you make that decision that’s fine, just make it in advance.

Mark V. Yeah exactly and just know that if you are going to choose to do something to dive deep into a niche and kind of alienate out people then you need to know, you need to go full force into that and be able to really make sure that the direction that you are heading is the direction that is going to be profitable for the long term of your business which can be, it can be, but you can also kind of pigeon hole yourself into a spot where you are complaining that you are not making enough money and your business is not successful, but you are not willing to bend on certain ideas or concepts or how you act.

Mark S. I think, I think, I’ve got one more don’t and then coz I feel a little negative now, because we’ve been talking about all the stuff that you don’t, don’t do these things. The last don’t that I am going to put on there is don’t argue.

Mark V. Yes.

Mark S. Don’t argue with your customers, don’t argue with anyone else on Facebook period.

Mark V. It’s actually, that’s a good rule always.

Mark S. Right shouldn’t argue with people.

Mark V. And on Facebook period. But a good rule to follow is two comments.

Mark S. That’s actually the rule. That’s actually in response to somebody says and we’ve done this all the time because we’ve got a lot of customers and not all of them are always 100% happy a 100% of the time. Someone will come out and say “Hey! This is terrible, I had this problem and they didn’t fix it, this company sucks.” So I could say well actually I am looking at our support, your records -we did solve that problem and you broke something else, you never called us back, you could get into that kind of an argument kind of a thing, but that’s not what you want to do, you’re want to say “I’m sorry you feel that way, I’ll be happy to take care of the problem from here, what can we do from now?”

Mark V. Yeah and encourage people to reach out to you directly, especially if somebody ordered a bunch of shirts and you were supposed to have 20 extra larges but you delivered 20 larges, now there is issue with sizes in how many they got and they are stressing out, you should respond on there, because other people are going to see it.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. You should respond with I am sorry, I am not sure -there was some miscommunication, there was some error made.

Mark S. I’m going to take care of that right away.

Mark V. I’m going to take care of it. And then reach out to them directly, or ask them to reach out to you, whatever is more appropriate and then see if they respond. And if they don’t respond from there, then good!

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. You said you were sorry, you said you were going to take care of it, you said to reach and the thread ended and that’s fine, if they come back and say “well, that’s not good enough.”

Mark S. Yeah, you ruined my event, you’re ugly…

Mark V. Yeah (laughing) then you could respond one more time after that and say “Let’s figure out a way together to resolve this”

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. I’m going to reach out to you, you reach out to me whatever it is, let’s contact each other directly and kind of end it. And if they are going to continue on that path then you are done.

Mark S. I don’t care what they say, do not respond more than two times. Keep in mind that this is a public forum and what you have done is you have demonstrated that you care and that you’ll take steps to fix it and a lot of times you’ll turn a customer around, it is really rare that someone will go on after two times and still beat you up, a lot of times it would be hey-they were great… That’s the response that I usually get… is “Hey Mark thanks a lot for your help, I really appreciate you stepping in and you guys are great”. But if you don’t get that still you can’t just keep going back and forth.

Mark V. People want to, they want to know that you care about what you delivered them because they paid money for it and it was important to them whether it was an event or a gift, or its for their business, whoever you are selling it to and if they are responding in a negative way and you are coming back and saying let’s resolve this one way or another.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Resolving it publicly isn’t always the best move.

Mark S. But what you want to do is you are demonstrating publicly that you are trying and you are a good company to do business with.

Mark V. Yes.

Mark S. And I guarantee you that people are watching, people are reading that thread and honestly if they get aggressive or they use profanity or they just keep going you can always delete the post.

Mark V. Absolutely.

Mark S. Yeah, you have ultimate control, you can delete the post if you want to.

Mark V. And it’s good sometimes to leave that stuff on there if it does get resolved, so if somebody says “Hey I ordered 20 large” Maybe they should’ve just called you directly but they chose not to, they chose to go there because it was for whatever reason and you say, well listen we will take care of this and their next response is okay great, I’ll call you after two, you can leave that up there.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Because you’ve essentially -you showed that here’s a real world problem that can happen, I responded to it in a professional way and my customer agreed to it.

Mark S. Agreed.

Mark V. And now you’ve displayed out to the public that if there is a problem you are going to take care of it. Which is a concern.

Mark S. Okay, so that’s enough don’ts, what are the dos of actually using Facebook, what do people do?

Mark V. You do interact, so if we are segling from the last statement, you do want to interact with people that post on your page and leave comments as much as possible, no matter what I think I am up to the opinion that a 100% of the posts that people put on there, you should have some sort of response to.

Mark S. Agreed.

Mark V. So they just say “Great work”

Mark S. Love your stuff.

Mark V. Perfect, your response could just be -thanks for the awesome feedback.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. That’s it, so you should interact with people when people go to your page and they see you interacting -you are building trust that way.

Mark S. Agreed.

Mark V. They know that you are there. They know that if they have an issue or whatever they need, they are going to be able to reach you very quickly.

Mark S. And also what happens whenever you respond is Facebook usually pushes the most recently commented on post to the top. So if you get a comment that you like and you respond to it, then it’s going to be back up to the top. So when someone new comes to your page, the first thing that they are going to see is, thanks it was great work and you responding.

Mark V. Exactly and that’s another reason why you don’t want to have an argument post.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. Because then your argument post is going to be the first thing that everybody sees.

Mark S. So if you are in the middle of a conversation with an unhappy customer, what you want to do is go find something else positive and comment on that so it stays at the top of the list.

Mark V. Is commenting on this going to gain me anything, that’s kind of always the rule for Facebook. Is doing this going to gain me anything. If not then is it worth doing it?

Mark S. So one of the big do’s that we talked about before you whether or not you create a Facebook page is interaction and ignoring it. So what kind of frequency do you recommend, how often you think people should post Marc?

Mark V. I think that there is a minimum and a maximum, what the minimum is 2-3 times a week.

Mark S. Okay, I was 3 and higher.

Mark V. Yeah and because when you are posting, if somebody is going to look at your history, you have to imagine what it is going to look like if your Facebook page is 90 days old, 3 months old.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. And somebody goes to your page, what’s it going to look like? if its 3 months old there is approximately 12 weeks which means if you did two, you’re going to have 24 posts on a 3 month old page, you’re going to have round in about a 100 posts a year.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. And your page will be nice and full.

Mark S. But on the other side if the last time you posted was about your Christmas special and it is February and somebody goes to the page and they see “Oh we’re having a Christmas sale on bling sweaters” Then they know that you don’t care, that you are not paying attention to it.

Mark V. That you are not paying attention to it, you are behind it. The funniest thing that I saw was… Oh gosh when was this? This was over a year ago. But this is not Facebook, this is the same thing.

Mark S. Okay.

Mark V. There is a Jim and it was April of last year and their sign-out front said something like: Get fit for the holidays now! And i’m just like what?

Mark S. For Valentine’s Day?

Mark V. This is April… I was like what holiday are you getting fit for? And that doesn’t make sense, this sign has probably not been changed in 6 months.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. This is the same things, that’s kind of your sign there.

Mark S. I agree.

Mark V. A couple of times a week, maybe three or more might be the number. I just like to think of it in the long tail of things, if you have a 100 posts in a year then you have a nice full page, you’ve got plenty of interaction on there.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. The more the merrier, if you are posting 10 times a day then now you’ve got another issue.

Mark S. You should be working. You should on the phone trying to make some sales.

Mark V. And the other issue is that if you are appearing in people’s feed, which would be a nice thing.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. You might be getting people to hide you from their feed.

Mark S. Because it’s a little too much.

Mark V. It’s a little too much, so you don’t want there, not everything that you post is going to be in people’s feed no matter what, no matter how much they like your page, they only getting to see only 15% of what you post in their feed, but if you are posting all day everyday and it’s not particularly entertaining, then you could lose some people that way and you don’t want people to dislike or unlike your page.

Mark S. And I also want to point out that you post three times a week for example, no matter how active your page is, so if its brand new and no one is on it and no-one goes, you should still post three times a week, because if it’s two months and you don’t have anybody that sign up to your page and there is just a few people and you look at it and say “I’m just not going to do this anymore it is a waste of time” when person number three, four and five come to your page they are going to see that you haven’t posted for a long time, that you don’t have that many friends or likes or whatever and they are just going to keep going.

Mark V. Yes.

Mark S. But even if it is a brand new page and you’ve got some content on there, like if you go to the ColDesi page, we post articles, steps for success in the new year, we will post a picture of a machine running, there is some interest there and a reason why someone might want to stay, look through the rest of the post and like the page.

Mark V. Absolutely, absolutely and with saying that, what do you post? Now I have to come up with 3 things a week to put on there and I know I don’t want it to be garbage and mostly I post pictures of my grand-kids or my political views.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. So what can we put up there?

Mark S. You can post pictures, videos and words; those are pretty much your choices, pictures, videos and words. So for pictures what I really like and I talk about it I think in every podcast is when you do a job for a customer, why don’t you use Facebook as your proof picture, so take a picture of the work that you’ve just completed and put it up on your business Facebook page and then send the link to your customers and say “Hey, I loaded up a picture of the work on Facebook, do me a favor and just say yes or no.”

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. Then you’ve got a picture of something that you’ve done, it is a good picture that you can take on your phone because there are great cameras now and it serves a couple of purposes, it gets your customers to go there and you know what? That customer is going to see that picture and if it looks awesome -they are going to share it.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. And then more people are going to come to your Facebook page.

Mark V. Yeah and it’s also interesting because they may request a change on that and that could be a cool interaction to allow a potential customer to see.

Mark S. How do you do business.

Mark V. So they could see you post something on there and the customer might say “that looks great but I would prefer this lettering to be larger or the whole thing to be a little smaller.” Great let me fix that up for you and then post a second one and then the customer says “that looks awesome!” That could be a very cool thing.

Mark S. Yeah it is being shared, you are getting good customer interaction, honestly it is a great technique to use, its great customer service, its a great technique to use to get people to like your page.

Mark V. Yeah and you mentioned sharing.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. So there is no shame in asking somebody to share it.

Mark S. Absolutely.

Mark V. So if they do say yeah, it looks great, I can’t wait to get all the work done then say “awesome, hey share it with your friends”

Mark S. Share it with everybody who is going to get one of these shirts. And now all of a sudden you have 57 new likes on your Facebook page.

Mark V. Yup and you can ask them to tag people in it and say “Feel free to tag anyone else that you want to see this”. If you don’t know what tagging is, you can start to type in a friend’s name in Facebook and their name will populate and it will let them know that somebody wrote their name on this page, so if they have got 6 sales people that work for their AC company and they are all going to be getting these shirts, you might get six more people to go there, they are on your page, they look at it, they might write yeah, it looks cool.

Mark S. It might show on their timeline so their friends would see that they have seen the shirt and liked it.

Mark V. Yeah and now that post gets pushed to the top as we mentioned earlier that posts that are being active are towards the top.

Mark S. That’s a really good idea, that’s a really good idea.

Mark V. I’m glad one of us thought of that.

Mark S. And you can do video too, you can do the same thing for video, especially if it is something that looks cool. Two things: an Embroidery machine if you have never seen it run, it is fascinating to see run and a DTG printer to see a completed design kind of roll out of a Direct to Garment Printer is fascinating as well and we’ve been at trade shows, people just stop to watch because they have never seen anything like that. You can take a very short thirty second video of maybe your machines running or maybe that last shirt for your customer being embroidered, take a thirty second video and when you upload that to Facebook and when people open your page, it automatically plays as long as you upload it directly to Facebook and nothing is more shared on Facebook than videos.

Mark V. Yeah absolutely, there is just a ton of things you can do, you can ask a customer to do a little video testimonial for a couple of seconds while they are at your shop picking things up.

Mark S. Yeah just use your cell phone, say “Hey what do you think of the order, do you mind if I record it?”; “Oh I love the shirts, you guys are great.”

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. Yeah then put it on your page.

Mark V. Yeah and if somebody is like, oh my gosh this looks fantastic I don’t know how to thank you, you can say, if you are not too shy- one way you can thank me (And be 100% honest with them), say “listen, I have Facebook page, I am trying to get more interaction on it because I am trying to grow my business, I did a good job for you, so I am sure you would like me to do better, one thing -i am trying to get a few people to say that I did a good job on video and I could share it” and if they are shy about it, they won’t have a problem to say… I didn’t do my hair today; I didn’t do my nails….

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. I get that all the time here. But if they are willing to do it, you’ll get a lot of people that’ll say “Yeah, I don’t mind” Especially if they are good and they are on that little bit of a high that they just got this cool thing.

Mark S. Honestly, especially if it is bling, I find that people go nuts over the rhinestones, the spangles or glitter, the vinyl looks great.

Mark V. So another thing to post.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Events.

Mark S. Okay, that’s good.

Mark V. We’ve talked about that a bunch of times. If you are going somewhere, if you are going to a boat show or horse show or a dog show or trade show or anything like that, tell your customers that you are going to be there and why you are going to be there and why they might want to come.

Mark S. Yeah and you could do that in a couple of ways, you could just use this as your words post, because we’ve talked about pictures, we’ve talked about videos, this is words that you could just describe the event that you are going to -or you can actually create the event on your Facebook page, so it is like you are hosting it. Even if you are attending a trade show, you could say “here is my event, come to my booth … in this place and buy a T-shirt, let me know if you are attending”

Mark V. Yeah, and you could use that post a bunch of times, coz you can announce it a few months ahead of time, you can announce it a week up, then you can announce it the day before or the day after.

Mark S. Its usually one of your one of three posts per week.

Mark V. Yeah, one event can take up six posts or more and then you can posts pictures at the event, you can post words at the event “Hey I’m here, this is great!” whatever it is.

Mark S. Check in on Facebook from the event.

Mark V. Check-in, it will eat up a lot of posts and that’s good content for the folks that are interested.

Mark S. Yeah people like it, people like it.

Mark V. People will like it and then another thing that’s kind of along that line is announcements about your business.

Mark S. I like that a lot, for example you could do a combo post, for example it is February 2nd right now, so how about your first T-shirt printed in February.

Mark V. Yup.

Mark S. So hey, just want to say thanks to Bob’s pest control, my first February customer, that’s a nice little note and then tag Bob’s pest control and Bob himself.

Mark V. Yeah absolutely.

Mark S. It is a great way to provide content; it is actually kind of useful.

Mark V. Yeah, it is, it will make your customers feel good and special and that you care about them, the announcements could be anything really. So one that I think of is, if you say “order a new shirt that you’ve never printed on before or a new cap that you’ve never sown on before and you like it, it sows out well, it prints well, it looks good, it is comfortable -then you can post on there -hey I just started using this new T-shirt that just came out made by Heinz or whatever, whoever makes it.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. And it is a great performance wear fabric, it feels really comfortable, if you are looking for T-shirts in this type of performance wear material for the summer coming up.

Mark S. This is what we should talk on.

Mark V. Yeah, ask me about this.

Mark S. I just want to reinforce like the way that you said that was very casual and that is the tone on Facebook.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. So, what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to make your print post like this: good evening customers and potential customers, I would like to announce the fact that I have issued a new optional clothing wear option, you don’t want to make it complicated or formal, you want to make it casual like it is on Facebook.

Mark V. Yeah, brief.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Brief and casual, that’s always another thing is that we all have been on Facebook pages and profile pages and timelines and all that stuff where somebody posts something that’s particularly long.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. It won’t get read statistically.

Mark S. Right, they’ll read the first sentence and that’s about it.

Mark V. If you have an announcement then keep it brief and if there is a lot of information you do have to share, I recommend either sharing it in the comments or maybe sharing it on a link on your website.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. But generally speaking if you have something really-really long to tell, don’t expect to put it on Facebook in a post and that all of your customers are going to read a 100 words about this announcement that you had -unless it is really really interesting or useful.

Mark S. Useful.

Mark V. Like: I am going to be at this event, hey everybody, getting to this horse event is hard because it is off the beaten path. Here are the directions.

Mark S. Here are the directions, that’s a great example.

Mark V. Maybe that might be a 100 words but that’s going to be something that somebody says “Yes I want that, now I’m going to read it”

Mark S. I like that, I like that. So we got events and I just want to say if you are stuck for content, you don’t have an event that you are going for and you can’t take pictures of your customers clothing for some reason then start going through your equipment and your personnel. So what you can do is if you work with your wife or husband for example, just take their picture while working and say “Hey, this is Bob Smith, he is my number one employee and oh by the way my husband” and post that up there if that’s the tone of your business. You have a heatpress, hey this is the heatpress that I am going to use to cure your next Direct to Garment Printed T-shirt. Take a picture of your building with snow in front “Snowing outside, still open for business”

Mark V. Yup.

Mark S. I would even say, do one picture, do one video and do one text.

Mark V. Yeah, that’s a great mixture that you could do and you will cover all your bases, you’ll have a lot of mixture of different things happening, If you are new, if you are really-really new like brand new and you literally have the amount of customers you can count on a hand then you should be practicing more than likely, you should be practicing.

Mark S. For like printing, embroidery and blinging and things like that.

Mark V. And digitizing and creating new artwork and if you have a direct to garment printer you should be using the machine, if you have an embroidery machine and you are new then you should be practicing in a lot of different materials and types of things, so yes make these things, you can feel free to make things just for yourself.

Mark S. Yeah absolutely.

Mark V. And share that, so you can take your logo and sow it out a 100 different ways, in a 100 different styles and in a bunch of different colors. If you have kids that go to a particular high school maybe, you can just make stuff for that, that you’re going to give to your kids.

Mark S. If you’ve got potential customers that you really want, then maybe you’ll do their logo or do a picture of their building and print it out on a T-shirt or something like that and then you can put on there and drop it by later.

Mark V. Yeah, that’s great, if you are in the Bling business turn things into Bling, so take a logo and turn it into Bling, take a picture of a logo and the Bling next to each other and blingified it, you know whatever it is. Do things and then post pictures of it, it could be pictures of the actual work or it can be a screenshot of a piece of art that you designed in Photoshop.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. It could be anything, it could be a video of your machine running, just do things.

Mark S. Yeah, agreed.

Mark V. And you don’t have to spend -we’re not talking about hours a week, this is not hours a week, it’s minutes a week.

Mark S. Agreed, so we’ve talked about -how often to post, the kinds of things that you should post, how to handle not arguing on Facebook and all of that stuff, one thing that we didn’t mention is “how do you get people to your Facebook page?”

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. So we didn’t talk about that.

Mark V. Lets talk about that.

Mark S. Lets spitball it because we didn’t prepare anything.

Mark V. No, but we already mentioned a few so far. So how do you get people to the page would be posting images of their work and tagging them in it, or sending them an E-mail link to something that you posted and asking them to share it with other people.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. One thing that I am not a fan of is begging all of your friends to like your page.

Mark S. Yeah, don’t have all of your friends like your page, just don’t do that.

Mark V. Yeah. It’s one of these things where for one: you don’t want to make somebody feel obligated that they have to do it, especially if they are just not into that, T-shirts are cool and embroidery is cool and it is fun, but when it is like commercial insurance.

Mark S. That’s a hard one.

Mark V. Stop asking me.

Mark S. I don’t want to like that page.

Mark V. My friend was a manager of a collections company and he wanted me to like that page.

Mark S. No! Definitely not.

Mark V. And that was the first time I called somebody out on, I was like NO I am not liking that I don’t like you.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. Nobody likes you.

Mark S. I don’t like that business. Stop calling me.

Mark V. But if you have friends that are encouraging and you know that they are encouraging, they will like your posts and share them, then yeah you should ask them, because they are your friends and you know that they are encouraging but don’t blast everybody and if you ask somebody once or twice and they don’t, take the hit.

Mark S. It’s okay.

Mark V. So you can ask people, you can put a sign in your business or a card or a flyer in your things that you sell, you can do that but that’s not really going to get a lot of likes on your page.

Mark S. I think one of the things that you can do to really bring up that count is to participate in your niche groups in your region.

Mark V. Yeah, that’s better.

Mark S. So if you go to Facebook and if you are in the Bling business and you type in “Tampa cheer-leading” or “Florida cheer-leading” and there is a cheer leading association or a club or things like that, if it looks appropriate and interesting for your business and what you do, then go ahead and join that group and start to participate in it.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. And if you do that, without being really obvious that hey I sell bling T-shirts, buy stuff from me, you contribute to the group then you’ll get people back to your page to like it.

Mark V. Yeah and the group that you are in might allow outside links.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. And then you can say If it is a car-lovers community and somebody is posting about their mustang and you printed a mustang T-shirt, then it might be appropriate to link to that.

Mark S. You can say “check this out! I printed a shirt!”

Mark V. “I made a shirt just like that for somebody in this city who has a similar car” whatever it might be. And often times it is appropriate, to do -if you have a website then putting the links on your website in your E-mail but give people a reason to want to like it.

Mark S. I agree. I think that is a little bit more difficult, so we will do things like this, we’ll offer an E-book download, we will do some more advanced things to get people to go to our Facebook page but the simple things are to join groups and participate and be useful, to put your Facebook page link in the bottom of every E-mail, even your personal E-mail.

Mark V. Sure.

Mark S. So in your signature, maybe it is Mark Stephenson -Sincerely Mark and then the link below that is join me on Facebook; or here is my business on Facebook and there is a link to your Facebook page.

Mark V. Yeah and there is a lot of different things that you can think of to get people to want to join.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. So if you are in a custom T-shirt business where you make themed shirts and you sell them online, then you tell somebody that this is where I announced shirts first.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. So I announce them here, and then they go on my website, be the first to know.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Or if you have exclusive deals on Facebook you could say.

Mark S. Which you should.

Mark V. Yeah you should. So I print T-shirts and I sell them online. I’ve got special deals for my Facebook friends. Click here to join and be one of them.

Mark S. I love that idea, that’s a great idea.

Mark V. And then hold up to that promise, that’s a big thing.

Mark S. Right you can’t ignore it, that’s part of the don’t, don’t ignore it if you do that.

Mark V. Yeah, sure if you have an E-commerce then you can put coupons on Facebook, if somebody is a Custom Apparels Startups member they will get coupons for Colman and Company that nobody else sees or gets as part of being a part of that group. That’s a reason to join, is that you are going to join and you are going to get a coupon that nobody else got.

Mark S. Could you go to http://colmanandcompany.com/ and find a place to sign up for that kind of thing.

Mark V. For coupons?

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Absolutely!

Mark S. Just want to say if you go to http://colmanandcompany.com/ and find a place where you can sign up for.

Mark V. Absolutely we have coupons there and there is coupons for folks who sign up there and there is coupons for folks who sign up on the Facebook page. You could do a lot of these different things.

Mark S. Yeah, yeah it is easy.

Mark V. Sometimes it can be exclusive, sometimes it is just a way to say “this is a place where I announce deals and specials and coupons.

Mark S. Honestly I am looking at the ColDesi Ink page and in the place where you can post a status update there is a little drop down menu that says offer or event.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. And I can pick offer and I can plug whatever I want into it, I can put a picture up, it’ll pick a picture off of my timeline, I can upload a coupon, whatever I want to do I can put it right there.

Mark V. You give people a reason to join whether it is to get a special deal, see something new, interact if it is, if you have a particular niche market it it is dog T-shirts that you are dealing with a lot of dogs.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. You could say: I post tons of pictures of dogs with custom apparel that I make for them, if you love dogs join this group because you are going to see some very cute stuff.

Mark S. That’s a good one I like that.

Mark V. You want to make sure that you give people a reason to join and then ask them.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. I think I mentioned this part before in another podcast, but I was in a shop where I got something for free because I joined their page, I think it was Facebook or might have been a Google review but you can use it for Facebook and this one particular was cell phone shop and you get a free screen protector if you like their Facebook page or commented on Google, it was something you could buy online for 3 bucks, but I was like I don’t have one and they are going to give me one for free right now.

Mark S. I’m in!

Mark V. I’ll take it and so you could do that.

Mark S. Bribery is fine there is nothing wrong with that.

Mark V. Yeah so you could say, you could have a particular T-shirt, maybe it is just a white T-shirt it is a cheap one to make and maybe your cost to make it is just a few bucks 2 bucks to make it 3 bucks minus your time, but you could say “Hey, if you sign up for this, I’ll give you this shirt”

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. And there are people that will do that.

Mark S. That’s good, it is a good way to add some numbers to your Facebook page and the more people that like your page and interact on your page, the more people that will like your page and interact on your page. Yeah, just the way it works.

Mark V. So is there anything else on here, any particular do’s or don’ts that we missed before we wrap it up.

Mark S. I don’t think so, I just wanted to point out that the tantalizing button that is on my Facebook page for ColDesi as I look at it right now.

Mark V. Sure.

Mark S. And that is the promote page or the boost post button.

Mark V. Okay.

Mark S. We’re not going to get deep into Facebook advertising on this one, we may at one point (I think that would be a good idea) But this is kind of interesting, what you can do is if you have a post that people like, particularly if it is a great video post, you can experiment with that boost post button and just see what it does, because what it will do is you’ll budget some money in order to push that post on other people’s timelines.

Mark V. Yes and you don’t have to spend a ton, 10 bucks 20 bucks can be enough often but when you boost that post, you literally pay Facebook to put that on the top of people’s pages in timelines and news-feeds and the top of the page, you’re telling them to share this more, them share it more to other people and not having to physically have individual users post it and move it around but Facebook, you’re paying them to move it around. So it’s a great thing to do.

Mark S. It is the easiest way to get into paid advertising, it really is.

Mark V. Yeah it’s the first step into it because there is no configuring, there is not much configuring.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. it is very simple, it takes about a minute to do.

Mark S. Agree.

Mark V. And when you do that -it will tell you what happened, it will show you how many people are reached, how many people liked it or shared it or liked your page because of it and then you can start putting a value to that.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. And you could say “Is it worth it”

Mark S. And then you are into the Know Your Numbers Podcast, which you should definitely listen to.

Mark V. Likes and people joining your page don’t necessarily mean money for you unless you are physically doing something on that Facebook page that’s generating business.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. So paying Facebook to get you a whole bunch more likes is not going to do you much unless you are really providing cause to action on the page and you are giving people a reason to buy from you after joining your page.

Mark S. That’s true and you have to really kind of dig into it a little bit, it will be great, we’ve talked about this stuff like this before, if you started playing around with boosting posts and saw what it did, invest a couple of bucks and then set one of your goals for this year to be the master of Facebook advertising because this is going to be a big deal.

Mark V. And the other thing to consider is why you would boost a post or not, so if your niche market is -school boards, you sell to schools and you go through with school boards and you deal with the minimum amount decision makers, it might not be worth a whole lot to you to do that.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. The reason that you’re going to have this page and you should have this page is so you can share a link with somebody a new decision maker, you can share them a link to your Facebook page and they can see other members of other school boards or teachers or kids wearing your apparel, the quality of the material made all in one place and there is some transparency, they can see other people agreeing with what you said.

Mark S. They get comfortable with your business.

Mark V. They get comfortable with your business, they trust your business, boosting that post might not get you any other board members to agree to do business with you, however if you have an online T-shirt store and you made a really cool T-shirt – kind of has the Star Wars type of theme to it right around the movie came out and all of this stuff, boosting that literally might mean that you get 20 people to come to your page and buy that shirt. It is worth literal money.

Mark S. If it is a cute dog wearing your Blinged out dog wear that you custom made -jumping all over the place and excited to be wearing it, then that video if you boost that will definitely drive people to your Facebook page and there are people that will spend on Bling shirts for their dog.

Mark V. Yeah absolutely so we went over a bunch of different things here, bunch of different do’s and don’ts, my final thought on it all is -Do, it keep it simple.

Mark S. Okay.

Mark V. That’s my thought on it, get on Facebook -create a page, do it and then keep things simple, you can keep your posts short, you don’t have to have a professional camera and a professional editor to edit every single picture, you don’t have to have a video camera then upload and edit and all these things, you can a lot of these things from your mobile device, you can do all of it from your mobile device.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. And just keep it simple and short and sweet and across the board with your interactions with people, with your pictures -everything and then you will do well.

Mark S. And for me is make sure you fill out everything when you create your Facebook business page, make sure that you fill out the about, the short description and the long description and you do all of that stuff and that you would adhere to the 2-4 posts a week rule where once a picture, once a video and once a text. I think if you do that and make other people aware of your page then you’ll actually have a better business because of it.

Mark V. Yeah you will and it is like sowing seeds in a farm, you are not going to do this and get business tomorrow, you might, you can get lucky. But you are going to be lucky, you are sowing seeds for a long term of your business, hopefully you got to this business because you wanted to do it for a long time and not just for six months and be done.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. So you are sowing long term seeds and your fruit will grow overtime but to just start it now and start doing it.

Mark S. Remind me to ban you from agricultural examples.

Mark V. Wait, you get to do age examples.

Mark S. I do because everyone ages and not everyone farms, I am just saying. So that was my last thing, make sure you do the three things -everyweek a picture, a text post and a video. Check out the boost post and make sure you fill out everything when you create your new page and you’ll need to do all this to get ready for when eventually we do an entire podcast on Facebook advertising because all of this has to be done in advance.

Mark V. Yup and then come to the Custom Apparel Startups page, join it if you haven’t already and please participate.

Mark S. We’ll talk about all of these things on there, ask questions there we like that a lot.

Mark V. Yeah that’s the best place, we’ve talked about E-mailing us and we do have that and calling us and such.

Mark S. But we don’t want you to that after this episode, we want you to go to the Facebook page.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. Go to the group.

Mark V. Because more people get to learn from you and because you will get other people that will bring in new perspectives which is cool too. Well, thanks for listening.

Mark S. Yeah, thanks everybody, this has been Mark Stephenson from ColDesi.

Mark V. And Marc Vila from Colman & Company.

Mark S. Have a good business.