Social Media Advertising is really starting to take off at present and it's only going to carry on getting bigger. If you are a Mobile DJ you should be making use of Facebook right now this very minute. Facebook has over 26M (yes that is twenty-six million) users from the UK alone and over 600M worldwide. Once that figure sinks in it should give you an incentive to start your Fan Page and expose your brand and hopefully get the phone ringing for FREE - with just a little time and effort. So lets show you what you can start doing on Facebook right now.
Setting up your Facebook Page
- Set up a Fan Page here - Facebook is all about sharing/liking a product or service and a Fan Page works great for Mobile DJs
- Put some pictures on of your setup - If you have more than 1 rig, extra lights, small-medium-large systems clearly label these with the types of event they would suit.
- Create different folders for different gigs - People who like your Fan Page can then ''tag'' themselves in your pictures which links them to your page
- If you have a video you can upload these directly to Facebook - Same again people can tag themselves in a video and share these on their profiles and with friends
- Make sure your Info section is clean, professional (spell checked!) and contains more than 1 way to contact you. Make sure you have your Phone Number, Email Address and link to your Contact Page on your website if you have 1.
So that's the easy bit out the way. Next you need some Likes. A Like is basically a Fan/Customer/Potential Customer etc etc clicking the Like button on your page and becoming a fan.. the more Like's you get the more potential customers you can advertise to. So tell all your friends to share your Fan Page. If you have a Facebook profile already share the link on your own page and get your friends and family to do the same. Once the ball starts rolling, and 1 person like's your page, that gets posted to their profile, 1 of their friend's see it, they can like it, it goes on their wall... you get the picture - it's a snowball effect.
So you might be wondering, well why would my potential customers Like my page? My previous 1's probably would but what incentive does a new person have. This is entirely down to you. It could be 10% off for people who mention your Facebook Page. It could be a free bottle of bubbly for everyone who mentions it, it's entirely upto you. The best way to advertise this is within your profile picture. Knock up an advert (or get a good graphic designer to do it) and set this as your profile picture. People like incentive's - Free Stuff, Money Off etc.. GIVE THEM AN INCENTIVE! It won't cost you much, and will do no harm if it increases your diary full to bursting!
If you have a website, this is the perfect opportunity to add a Like Box/Button to your website. It's relatively easy to do and I'm sure if you made your own website, you could do this quite easily. If you pay a web company to manage your website I would imagine most would charge next to nothing to add this. To do it yourself visit the development page
here.
Once you have all this set up, and followed the points above, you should have a few fans and things will be getting going. Setting up your page and sharing this around friends and family should take you an hour or 2 max, even for the least computer savvy amongst us and now we can look at some other points.
Spreading the word - The POWER of social media 'word of mouth'
I mentioned earlier about putting up photo's of your gigs in a new folder for each gig. This gives you the chance to get out there on to other people's pages - remember this is FREE advertising!! So last week you did John's 50th and took your camera to snap a few guests - this is for the guests only by the way - not a chance to show off your equipment - you shoudl have already done that. John is a member on Facebook and you upload the photo's to a album called John 50th and add the date at the end so 14/06/11 etc.. You can then go through your photo's and ''tag'' people's faces. Tagging is basically where you can label people's face in the pictures. When you tag somebody is shows up on their wall, in their photo's and on their friends news feeds. When 1 of their friends comments on that photo, it then shows up on their news feeds aswell. Each comment/like/tag is more and more exposure for you Fan Page. Again the snowball effect. More like''s and tags and comments = more traffic to your Fan Page. They might not need a DJ this week, or this year, but they'll remember if they went to a party, or their friend had a party and come and find you through your page.
Facebook Advertising
To finish up I think it's only right we talk about Facebook Ads aswell. Facebook holds billions of pieces of data about it's users, with everything from ages, to geographic locations, what you like, when you login... the list is endless, and if you would like to advertise on Facebook you can take advantage of
Facebook Ads. This unfortunately costs money, and is called CPC, or Cost Per Click. Each time a person clicks on your advert, it costs you so many pence (usually between 10-40pence per click), but unlike Google CPC, Facebook can really narrow down your advert placement criteria. Age, location, sex, interests, relationship status, education, workplace, likes etc make it easier than ever to target specific groups of people to reduce costs and increase ROI. This will ofcourse take up alot more time, and should only be considered to extend your marketing strategy, but used correctly and with the right budget could see you make a good ROI.