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You have a great product, service, blog or an idea to engage a certain segment of your online community. Whatever the case, your next order of business is to create a Facebook page.

Five minutes later, the page is active and open for business. Simple enough. Next on the agenda is to build a fan base. Facebook makes it easy; allowing the page administrator to send page invites to their personal Facebook friends.

The hard part is getting the invitees to click on the LIKE button and getting them to engage with the page.

With the possible exception of George Takei, page fan/follower engagement is the number one hurdle to overcome. This may well be an area where time honored marketing strategies need to be thrown to the wayside.

To transform your product, service, blog or idea into a Facebook “brand”, one must think outside of the box. Yes, that is cliche and, while I do regret using the term; it is appropriate in this instance.

A few of the strategies, I have found that work are:

  • When possible, tag your friends, coworkers, fellow organization members when posting photos of events. A simple way to direct traffic to your page and elicit engagement;
  • Engage with other pages as your page persona either by liking, commenting on and/or sharing their posts. To create engagement, you must also be engaging.
  • Always acknowledge those that are engaging with the page. Do not ignore the comments or posts made by your followers. Whether it be just liking their comment or responding with a full blown reply, it shows that you are interested in them as individuals and not just for their contribution to the page’s number of likes.
  • Never ignore the page insights that are available to all administrators. The data is invaluable to determining what it working and what isn’t.
  • An important thing to remember is to know who your target audience is. If you are running a page about cupcakes, posting pictures about cheeseburgers is not quite going to work; that is, unless you can somehow creatively tie the two together.

That brings me to my final point; be creative. Simply creating a page will not bring on fans or sales. It takes a lot of trial and error to find the right mix along with the realization that a successful page will not happen overnight. Also, you need to realize that success is fleeting if you do not continue to work at it.