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| The Resume Writers' Digest Facebook page |
Your Facebook presence can be a great way to get the attention of prospective resume clients -- and stimulate referrals.
Here are two tips to help you maximize your results on Facebook.
Don't forget to use your personal page on Facebook to drive your resume business.
I've seen a couple of career industry professionals recently who are working to transition their "followers" to their Facebook business pages. If you value your privacy but still want to spread the word about your services, it can be smart to keep your "friends" to people you've actually met and family members. Friend requests from people you don't know -- or prospective or current clients -- can be directed to your Facebook Business page.
Facebook actually made this more confusing in the past few months as they introduced the "Subscribe" feature, which allowed people to receive your public Facebook status updates in their News Feed if they "subscribed" to you. But outside of a couple hundred high profile individuals, the idea wasn't widely adopted. And it seemed to counteract some of Facebook's own standards. Why limit individuals to having 5,000 "friends" and encourage them to use a business page to promote their services (and create a Terms of Service agreement that penalizes personal profiles set up as companies or organizations) and then later encourage adoption of subscriptions to personal profiles? I don't get it.
With that said -- even if you decide to limit your business promotion to your Facebook Business page, and keep your personal account's "friends" list to people you know well (or better, at least!), don't neglect sharing business-related information on your personal page. There is a lot of power in your personal account's Facebook contacts. If you have a particularly good piece of content, don't just post it to your Facebook Business page's wall. Post it on your own as well. Your friends might like it or share it, resulting in more of their network seeing the content, which leads to more views on your page.
An even BETTER tip is to link to your business page in the post. That way, when it's shared, you're also driving traffic to your Facebook Business page, which can result in referrals, new business -- or, at least, a new "Like."
The second tip has to do with post timing and frequency.
Post early (and late) and often.
There is a lot of research out there about when is the best time to post content on your Facebook page (early morning, before the employed go to work? Mid-morning, for the unemployed? Late nights for college students?)
Unless you have thousands of Facebook fans (I am actually a backup admin for a Facebook page with more than 54,000 fans), a more important guideline than "when" to post is "how often" to post.
Most people have their page settings set so that they "sometimes" see your status updates on their feeds. That means that the more often you update, the more likely it is that something you posted will show up on your followers' feeds.
Don't post more than once or twice a day; but try to post at least once every two or three days. If you can post good content once a day, so much the better -- but don't post shoddy content just to fill space. It's fine to be a "curator" of content as much as a content "creator." That means sharing interesting and relevant articles from other sources (even other resume writers!), but be sure to add your own commentary, or -- better yet, spark engagement by asking a question like, "What would you do if you were asked for your Facebook password in an interview?" on a link to an article about employers requesting access to applicant Facebook accounts. The more someone interacts with your posts (likes, comments, shares), the more likely that content is going to show up in their News Feed in the future.
If you find it difficult to remember to post (or if you prefer to "chunk" your marketing activities and do them all at once), use Facebook's "post scheduler" feature on your Facebook Business page or a third-party service like Hootsuite and write all your posts all at once, but schedule them to "drip" out over time.
These are a few smart ways of making Facebook more effective in your resume writing business.
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