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Cindy Ratzlaff

Bestselling author, award winning brand marketing and social media pro, Cindy Ratzlaff, creates sales driving campaigns for authors, books and publishers.

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Facebook Marketing Tips

How to Market with A Facebook Personal Profile

By Cindy Ratzlaff July 28, 2015

While I think every author, brand or entrepreneur needs a Facebook business page, there is still a great deal you can do, right now, to optimize your personal profile to increase your personal brand visibility – and use Facebook more efficiently for your business.

Facebook builds in some terrific marketing features for business pages and every brand, business, entrepreneur and author needs a business page to fully take advantage of the rich ecosystem where more than one billion people log in every month. But did you know that your personal profile also has some great hot spots for promoting your business – without driving your friends and family crazy? Here are my four favorites and you can start using them to increase your brand visibility, today.

Personal profile tool #1 – Save This Link

Ever find a great article or image when scroll through Facebook but you don’t have time to look it over right now? You think to yourself, I’ll come back and read it later. Then you can’t remember where you saw it? Me too. And now, thanks to Facebook’s new “Save this Link” option, which you’ll find under the drop down menu on the post you are reading, you can save that post and access it later from the left hand side of your home page under “Saved.” Use this to save articles and images you want to share with your followers later on. When you curate great content and share it with your followers, you become a resource for them. You become that trusted brand that provides them with the tools, tips and knowledge they need. Be a curator of great content with “Save this link.”

Personal profile tool #2 – Filter with Lists

Only a fraction of your connections see your posts in their news feed on any given day, and, you don’t see everyone or every page you’ve liked either.

Lists are my secret-weapon in saving time on Facebook. I have lists of clients, leaders in my industry and people who write about social media tools and tips, just like me. Creating lists helps you access the content you want – and need – to see with the click of a button. When you like a page or accept a friend request, remember to use the “add to list” option and choose the appropriate list for every new connection. Once you create a list, you can click on that list, from your left hand home page menu and filter the news stream to see only the posts from the people in that particular list. Think how much time that will save you when looking for good content to share from colleagues or when commenting on good posts from the pages of people you want to do business with. You can create lists, while logged into your personal Facebook account. Go to your home page and on the left hand side of your screen you’ll see groups you’ve joined, pages you’ve liked and a header that says “Friends.” Mouse over to the right of the word friends and you’ll see the word MORE. Click on that and you’ll be prompted to “Create a List.” Name your list and start typing in the names of friends or pages you’d like to include in the list. That’s it. And, you’ll access the list from your homepage screen. You can make your lists private, as you might want to do with a list called “competition,” or public, such as you might want to do with “A-listers,” – which, again, makes you a resource to others. Use lists to organize your connections and make the news feed work for you and your business goals.

Personal Profile tool #3- Targeted Posts

Target who sees which posts. A great reason to create lists is that you can customize who sees your posts. Create a post and then use the drop down menu under the post, which is set to “Public” by default and choose “Custom.” That’s where you can choose to post something to the people on one of your custom lists, only – perhaps clients. Imagine the power of creating a client-only special discounted offer and sending it out from your profile without anyone else seeing the post.

 Personal Profile tool #4 – Pop Up Business Card

Add a pop up business card to your personal profile on Facebook.Did you know that by filling out your entire Facebook profile “about” information, you can link your business page to your personal profile so that a Pop Up virtual business care displays when someone mouses over your business name on your profile?  This is just one of the many places Facebook provides to promote your business without advertising. So once you’ve created your business page, come back to your profile and enter the complete URL for your business page into the “Works At” section of your “About Me” information.

Additionally, you can share your business page posts to your profile, as well as invite your personal profile friends to “Like” your business page. Use these personal profile-only tools strategically to introduce your business to the widest possible audience.

Using these free visibility hot spots, which are already built into the Facebook platform, is a good way to increase the chances of being seen by your ideal customer, client or reader on the social platform where they spend their leisure time, Facebook.

*Featured Image Credit: Twin Design / Shutterstock.com

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Filed Under: Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: Marketing, Social Media, social media tools

About Cindy Ratzlaff

Cindy Ratzlaff was named to the Forbes “20 Best Branded Women on Twitter” list and Forbes Woman called her one of the “Most Influential Women Tweeting about Entrepreneurship.”

During her 20-plus years as a publishing executive, Cindy created branded marketing and PR campaigns that ushered more than 200 books onto the New York Times bestseller lists. She was named to the Ad Age Marketing 50 list for the launch campaign behind The South Beach Diet.

She is the author of three books, and her essays on happiness have appeared on Oprah.com, CNN.com and her articles on social marketing have can be read on Business Insider. She speaks to conferences such as BookExpo America, Pennsylvania Conference for Women, Romance Writers of America, Ernst & Young, Garden Writers Association, Texas Conference for Women, United Way’s Ignite Leadership Network, Massachusetts Conference for Women, and more on the topics of happiness, personal branding and creating a digital footprint.

She engages daily with more than 450,000 people through her popular Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blog sites.

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