How many of you child care owners are thinking – WHAT is the heck is the point of social media? I don’t want to take time out the gazillion other things I have to do to post on Facebook, to the 150 fans I have, that never see my status updates anyways. Why does this all matter? Why should I care about posting on Facebook for my child care business?
It’s important to understand that beyond all the advanced targeted advertising you can do on Facebook (click here to get tips on how to do this), at it’s very basic element, social media CREATES and SUSTAINS RELATIONSHIPS with your potential child care clients. Your Facebook page is the face of your business, a complement to your website, where potential clients interact with you. Your posts should support your brand, tell your story, engage your fans, and create relationships.
When you learn how to craft engaging posts, Facebook serves as a great platform to market yourself for minimal investment. It serves as a continuous engagement point with your families, prospects, and community as a whole. It allows prospects to get to know you, for free. Your Facebook page represents what you stand for and it’s where you gather and communicate with your community.
It’s been shown in various studies that you need at least 7 points of contact with a customer before they do business with you. Well guess what? This is a great platform for creating multiple points of contact for potential child care clients to get to know, like, and trust your child care business.
I hear a lot of child care owners getting frustrated because they don’t have a lot of likes on their Facebook pages. It’s important to focus on ENGAGEMENT and not how to get more LIKES on your page. Engagement creates relationships, gets your posts seen by a larger audience, and is a good investment of time. While it’s great to grow your fan base, compare it to an email list. If you grow your email list but send out unengaging emails that never opened, what is the point? You need to have interaction with your potential clients. When you have engagement and are posting out useful, valuable content, your fan base will organically grow.
I am focusing on Facebook because I don’t see a whole lot of child care owners leveraging their Facebook pages and getting results. Once you know how to do this for your business, you can transfer it onto ANY social media. It is good to focus on just one or two while you are learning.
Ultimately, Facebook is a marketing machine where you can send traffic to your website, collect leads, and turn leads into enrollments. How to do this is a whole long course by itself (which we will be releasing soon, click here to stay updated!) but it is very important to get the basics down in communicating with your audience on Facebook before making this leap. If you know how to communicate to your audience on an organic (free) level than you will get better results with your paid advertising
Want more information about Facebook can market your childcare, click here.
