Are you struggling with ROI on the time and money you spend on your business page on Facebook? That was me for many years trying to get more clients into my business by posting about it on my business page. I thought I was creating great content by sharing links to online articles highlighting the advantages of hiring someone like me to help local business with their digital marketing strategies. I also spent a lot of money trying to run Facebook ads but did not get a single lead that was worth pursuing.
It felt exhausting, and my business was stuck in the same spot. It affected the way I felt and the way I communicated with the people around me because I felt trapped. One day, my patience ran out as I realised that instead of running a proper business, I was treating myself as a glorified employee. I wasn’t focused on the quality of people and companies I worked with or marketing my own business and getting more and better clients I could serve.
That day, I decided to change the way I do things. I knew I needed to be where more people congregate and Facebook looked like a perfect platform to choose as my center stage. By then, I knew that my business page was not a productive place to reach people. I also knew about Facebook’s policy against using our personal profiles for commercial gain.
What it did not have anything against was building visibility as an expert, growing an audience with quality content and building authority through sharing what people who experienced working with you achieve. This is all I needed to be able to confidently start using the best-kept secret platform – my personal profile on Facebook – for building the business to support the life of my dreams.
Emotional Connection
The first and most important aspect one should focus on when creating content for their personal profile is connecting with others on a truly deeper level. It is only possible when you are showing up authentically and sharing stories of empowerment, growth, and vulnerability. This is how your audience can resonate with you on a personal level.
Why? The truth is that most of the time, people work with people, and they buy into people. They are not even choosing the best of a kind in their field. It is about a personal connection above everything. So for me, or anyone who works with people’s inner worlds as well as whatever else they offer, this connection is paramount!
This is the stage where we separate the right people from the wrong. The stage of attracting the best and repelling the rest – a real human factor based funnel of life. Don’t you want to work only with people you genuinely love and respect? I do! But it is only possible when you are very selective about who shares your world — funnelling the right people from your audience with content focused on emotional connection is the most critical part.
“Carve your name on hearts and not on marble.” – Charles Spurgeon
Trust
After you have an audience of people who are already deeply connected to you based on who you are, you enter the second stage of the funnel – you start building trust with your audience. The ones that may be interested in what you do professionally must trust that you really are an expert in what you do.
How do you achieve that without breaking any Facebook rules? Simply by talking about your business in a very indirect way, sharing specific strategies and tips. Talking about what is happening behind the scenes. Talking about your achievements, your current projects and your goals.
If you are consistent – and being consistent is the only way to get attention in the busy world of social media – you are not only positioning yourself as a go-to name in your niche with all those fantastic tips you are sharing. You are giving them all that value absolutely free – so people are not feeling pressured by you into a sale.
What happens instead is that the right ones, who need what you do, get excited about the possibility to work with you. Some will already start reaching out or responding to your friendly (and never salesy) private messages in a very positive way. However, to succeed, you need to add one more critical element to your content.
Authority
If you want to convert people, you must come across as an authority and someone worth following. You must be someone who gets results! Otherwise, you face dealing with people who want to “pick your brain,” cannot afford the prices you set or simply disregard all the hard work you are doing and see you as a peer.
And here we face the truth. People do judge the book by it’s cover. Creating the impression of someone important does not need to include something spectacular, like getting featured in Forbes. Start with sharing your client’s testimonials, talk about their wins, create a podcast or a Facebook shoe (like I did) and start showing up as a host interviewing other entrepreneurs or people who compliment your primary line of work.
On top of that, start a blog, write articles regularly (at least two a month) and repurpose those articles to online publications with huge audiences, like Medium.com and Thrive Global. And then start focusing on getting published in the more exclusive publications like Addicted2Success! It is absolutely achievable.
“Read every book, blog, website, whatever, about what you want to be an expert in.” – James Altucher
Adding the positioning of an author or a contributing writer and appearing as a guest on podcasts and social media interviews will definitely create that aura of importance that attracts clients who never argue your expertise or your prices.
Becoming visible, growing your audience and eventually converting by using your Facebook personal profile as a center stage, can boost your business into the stage where struggling with finding clients will be a fading memory. And then you can add some advertising into the mix and scale the whole thing up.
I guess the formula is simple. But it will take commitment, consistency and dedication. It took me under 18 months to completely transform my business, and now I am teaching other entrepreneurs the exact strategies I used to start living the life of my dreams.
