Chapter 5
In This Chapter
Finding out whether you should turn on your Follow button
Understanding how to post publicly
Posting business milestones on your personal Profile
Changing your Public Timeline to support your business
Using personal Cover photos that support your business
We deliberately crafted the title of this chapter. Notice the word support in the title. We’re not suggesting that you turn your personal Profile into a straight-up business Page. Please make sure that you understand the difference between a Profile and a business Page by reading all of this book!
What we’re saying is that you can use your Profile to support your business in some very specific ways, such as finding out whether the Follow button is right for you, understanding the difference between a Public post and a Friends post, and how you can use photos on your Profile that support your business without breaking any Facebook rules.
Facebook realized that some people in this world are best served by a modified personal Profile instead of a business Page. These people are considered to be public figures. Are you a public figure? Maybe you are but don’t realize it!
The Follow button is something you can turn on inside your Profile so that people can follow your public updates. We describe each of these terms in this list:
So now you need to determine whether you are a public figure and whether you should go through the process of turning on your Follow button. Through this process, you also see whether you need to have both a Profile with the Follow button turned on and a business Page. Table 5-1 shows the different available features for a personal Timeline with the Follow button and a business Page.
Note: Turning on your Follow button is available only to those over the age of 18.
Table 5-1 Which Facebook Features Do You Need?
Available Features |
Personal Timeline + Follow Button |
Business Page |
Use for both Friends and a bigger audience |
X |
|
Quick mobile updating |
X |
|
Timeline applications (personal) |
X |
|
Interest lists/groups/chat |
X |
|
Privacy settings |
X |
|
Timeline layout |
X |
X |
Facebook Insights |
X | |
Multiple people can admin |
X | |
Custom tabs and apps |
X | |
Target updates by location/language |
X | |
Promote with ads and sponsored stories |
X |
Use these questions to help determine whether the using Follow button is right for you. Keep count of how many questions you answer, “Yes.” By the end of the quiz, it will be obvious whether you need to continue reading this chapter.
“Public figure” is a slippery term. According to Facebook, authors, magazine and newspaper writers, politicians, actors, and radio and TV personalities are public figures, but there are other definitions, too.
When others think of you, do they think “public figure”? You may be a spokesperson for some type of event (local, regional, or national), or you may represent a topic (such as a conversation in your business niche or a nonprofit organization).
Do people seek you out when they have a question about your business niche? Do you speak about your business niche at events?
Most small-business people carry both sides of their lives — business and personal — with them wherever they go. If you’re walking down the street, and someone says “Hi,” does she also ask you about your family or your business or both?
Look back at your personal posts on Facebook for the past year. How many of them are related to your business niche? Would you share more of those types of posts if you felt that people wanted to see them?
Have people who you don’t know personally asked to be your Friends? Have you ignored a bunch of people who’ve asked to be your Friends?
Are you setting yourself up to be a public figure in the future? Do you want to be a public figure?
Do you sell information products that feature you as the expert?
Apple = Steve Jobs. Is that the kind of relationship you have with your company?
Don’t turn on your Follow button if you answered most of the questions, “No.”
Do turn on your Follow button if
We show you how to turn on your Follow button in the next section. Anyone can turn on his Follow button (even people who answered “No” to all the previous questions). Give it a whirl: You can turn it on to test it out and then turn it off if it doesn’t work for you.
So you decide to turn on your Follow button. Take a minute to understand some important points about the Follow system, which can be very confusing at first.
“Follow” is how Facebook explains a connection. You and your Friends are following one another. You’re still called Friends, but the function is “following.”
After you turn on your Follow button, you won’t be able to see the Follow button on your Timeline. This aspect is the most frustrating part of teaching people how to turn on the button! Just trust us on this one. The button is there; you just can’t see it if you’re logged in as yourself.
To turn on your Follow button, follow these steps:
Now you are on a page with several sections. The top section is labeled Who Can Follow Me.
You also need to continue the process and edit your settings for comments and notifications. We will get to that in the next section. Here are a few interesting points about the Follow button:
How do people follow your updates? After you allow followers, a Follow button shows up on your Profile. Someone would need to visit your Timeline to click the Follow button, or click the Follow button if your Profile shows up in the Ticker. Or, if someone hovers over your name somewhere on Facebook (such as a comment in a thread) they have the option of following you right from the hover card that pops up. Facebook might change these ways, or add to them in the future. Facebook has also created a nice interface (https://www.facebook.com/follow/suggestions) where you can see all the people who have turned on their Follow button.
Followers can see only the things on your personal Profile that you share publicly. We show you how to see which things are public on your Timeline in the “Adjusting Your Timeline for Public Viewing” section later in this chapter.
After you turn on your Follow button, you need to adjust the settings for Comments and Notifications. Both settings are important, and we explain them both in this section. You can go back and change these settings at any time, so don’t stress about them too much at this point. See how everything goes; you’ll know what you need to change over time.
When you select Everybody next to Who Can Follow Me (refer to Figure 5-1) to turn on your Follow button, you see a new dialog box with the following settings to adjust. After you adjust any of these settings, they’re automatically saved:
You can set your personal username and your custom URL for your Pages by going to this address: https://www.facebook.com/username.
To adjust these settings at a later date, just come back to this Page in your profile’s Settings page. Also notice that you can see how your Timeline appears to your Followers by clicking the link at the bottom of this page: Want to Know What Followers Can See? View Your Public Timeline.
Visit this link from time to time to make sure you haven’t shared anything publicly that you didn’t want to. You can adjust the settings on any post or picture after you’ve posted them.
After you turn on your Follow button, and people are starting to follow you, you need to remember to post publicly the kinds of things that will support your business.
Because this is a post from your Profile, add your personal take, feelings, and experience to the post. The following list offers some examples of types of Public posts:
Figure 5-3 shows where the posting icon is located. You need to make sure that you select Public (the option with the globe icon).
You can change the icon when you’re posting on your Timeline and in the News Feed view. Just remember to check the icon before you post. You can change the icon on your mobile phone with the same process of using the drop-down menu and selecting the globe.
Sometimes, the way you posted the last time is the default for the next time you post. This situation happens a lot when you post from a mobile device. You can make sure that the default is always Public or always Friends by going to your Privacy Settings (see Figure 5-4) on your computer and setting your preferred default. If you tend to post things from your phone that need to be public, choose Public as the default.
This section title might bring up all sorts of comments, such as, “You can’t market on a personal account.” That’s completely true. But you can support your marketing by allowing people into your business world through your personal experience of your business. There’s an art to sharing and marketing appropriately through a personal account. As we state at the beginning of this chapter, if you wrap your posts in deeply personal impressions, being human and being transparent, you can open this personal-account door to more potential customers.
As with all social accounts, learning how to be an attraction-based marketer will serve you well. Some of the tenets of attraction-based marketing are
If you’ve turned on your Follow button, you can do all the things we suggest in Book II, Chapter 2, including these:
If you get some traction with people following you, you may find yourself on this page:
https://www.facebook.com/follow/suggestions
Many people you follow may be “A-list people,” in that every time they post, hundreds of people comment. You may notice that some Internet rock stars (including Mari Smith and Robert Scoble) really interact with their followers. Robert responds only to what he would call intelligent questions. The lesson is this: Don’t just post “I agree” or “Good post.”
After you turn on your Follow button, you have three types of followers:
If someone puts your personal Profile on a list and shares the list, people will be able to follow the list. When that happens, you gain another number in this category. Even though they’re following the list, Facebook gives you the added number. You can find Interest lists to follow at www.facebook.com/addlist.
To see who is in each category, click the Friends link on your Timeline. Then click Followers to see the people who are following you, like you see in Figure 5-5. Notice that some of your followers have turned on the Follow button themselves, and you can follow them back right from here. (Keep in mind that you will see only their Public updates, also.) Or if you mouse over their name, a hover card pops up, and you can request friendship or see whether they have requested friendship from you and you haven’t responded yet (which is why they appear in your Followers list).
If you’ve been put on an Interest list, you see the name of the list and numbers that are hyperlinked to those people by clicking the Followers via Lists link. See Figure 5-6 for a list of several numbers and information to explore.
This step is very important. Some people call the personal Timeline the ultimate résumé because of the wonderful Life Events feature. This is basically the same thing as adding milestones on a business Page except that this interface is really detailed. (We discuss milestones in great detail in Book III.) Life Events can go all the way back to when you were born! Now you can add as many Life Events as you want, in many areas, but in this section, we focus on using Life Events to support your business.
You can add Life Events when things like these happen:
You can add all sorts of things to this list. Focus on adding these life events, and make sure to make them Public. Add your personal experience to each post, in your authentic human voice.
A few don’ts: You can’t add things with future dates. Don’t make Life Events one big infomercial. And don’t post all your Life Events at one time; spread them out over a few weeks.
Here’s how to create a Life Event on your personal Timeline:
You see a set of options: Work & Education, Family & Relationships, Home & Living, Health & Wellness, and Travel & Experiences.
Subcategories appear in a submenu, as shown in Figure 5-7.
All the subcategories have Create Your Own as an option. If you opt for that, you get to create a custom title for the Life Event. Unless your Life Event matches one of the categories perfectly, choose Create Your Own.
Each subcategory has slightly different fields to fill in. Fill in as much information as you can. Make sure you adjust the date fields to be the date of the Life Event.
Always upload or choose a photo. A photo really makes a Life Event pop on the Timeline.
The whole point of this task is to create items that the Public and your Public followers can see on your Timeline. (The Public icon is the globe.)
Your Life Event is placed on your personal Timeline on the date you set for it. Go look. Life Events are wonderful to view on a Timeline.
At the top of your Profile, you can see a black strip indicating that you’re looking at your Timeline as someone from the Public would see it. You can look through your entire Timeline to see what Joe Public sees. If you see anything that you don’t want the public to see, go back to your Timeline and change who can see a particular post. For example, if you find a post that you meant just your Friends to see, follow these steps:
You can view your Timeline as a particular person sees it, so you know if you’ve shared other posts correctly. Just click the View as a Specific Person link in the black strip and put that person’s name in the box. Now you can make sure any posts that you shared just with local friends or just with business lists appear correctly.
Facebook doesn’t want you to think of your Page’s Cover photo as a billboard; it wants you to think of the Cover photo as a view of the spirit or soul of your business. The same idea applies to the Cover photo for your Profile.
Figure 5-9 shows a Profile Cover photo that supports a business, but other sides of Amy Porterfield’s life, too.