5 Essential Tips for Marketing Your Facility on Facebook

Have you created a Facebook Profile for your storage facility? The good news is that by embracing social media you’re ahead of the trend – just by listing your facility on Facebook you’ve opened up a market with nearly a billion different members, exposure to whom is completely free. The bad news is that you’re probably not handling your account the right way. Mishandling your facility’s social media accounts doesn’t just mean that you’re missing out on an excellent opportunity to build your brand and increase exposure, but it can in fact make your business appear amateur and unprofessional and thus mar its image in the eyes of your potential customers.

As the social media expert here at SelfStorageDeals.com – one of America’s leading search engines for cheap storage units – I’ve found that while a few storage facilities have taken expertly to social media, the vast majority have some glaringly obvious problems. And while I know little of your storage scene across the pond in the UK, I have noticed that the same pattern holds true: storage facilities have been painfully slow to adapt to social media.

Here are five essential tips that will take your facility’s Facebook marketing efforts to the next level:

1. Pages vs. Profiles

The most immediate and concerning trend I’ve noticed with the way storage facilities are using Facebook is their use of Profiles rather than Pages. To put it succinctly, “Profiles” are for private persons, while “Pages” are for businesses, celebrities, and public figures. A quick means of discovering if you’re using a Profile instead of a Page is to check if you have “Friends” or “Fans” – only Profiles can send or accept friend requests, while Pages receive “likes” from other Facebook users who then become “fans”.

Why is having a Page rather than a Profile important for your facility’s marketing strategy? To begin with, it’s against Facebook’s User Agreement for businesses to create Profiles or private people to create Pages. While Facebook hasn’t yet become stringent in enforcing this policy, it might in the future – meaning that your facility’s Profile is in danger of deletion.

Another reason is the legitimacy a Page creates: since Facebook only allows real businesses to create Pages, your customers will know that you’re not some scam that’s built a fake Profile. Your customers will thus be certain that you’re an earnest business that follows the rules and can be trusted.

Finally, creating a Facebook Page allows you to view “Insights”, which are Facebook’s analytics platform. Insights will tell you how many people see your posts (including friends or fans), how each post performs (in terms of likes and shares), the gender and location of your audience, and the number of people who’ve visited your Page. Such metrics can then be used to determine which of your marketing strategies are effective and which aren’t.

2. Engage your fans

When using Facebook you might have noticed that if you interact with another user – liking their status, sharing their links, or even visiting their profile – they’ll suddenly begin to appear on your News Feed with greater frequency. You’re not imagining this, nor is it a coincidence: Facebook designed its News Feed to give prevalence to users you’ve recently interacted with.

What does this mean from a marketing standpoint? It means that to be successful you must build momentum: you must encourage your fans to interact with your page as soon as possible after they’ve started following you, or else your posts will rarely or never appear on their News Feed. Think of it like this: as soon as someone has “liked” your Page they’ll certainly see your next few posts on their timeline. But if they don’t interact with any of those posts (by liking, sharing, or commenting on them) they’ll start to see fewer and fewer of them, all the way down until you’re rarely appearing on their News Feed. On the other hand, if you are successful in coaxing them to interact with your posts then they’ll see your activity on their News Feed at a higher frequency.

So how does one coax new fans into interacting with you? The secret is to post original and interesting content. You’ll need to stand out from the bunch with a post that your fans want to share with their friends, so find something interesting and eye-catching (yet still relevant to your business). Your posts should also include a call to action – directly ask your fans a question or encourage them to leave their opinion as a comment on your post. For example, find a story about something interesting that someone found in a storage unit and post it to your wall with the question “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen inside a storage unit?”

3. Know what to post

As we saw with #2, success on Facebook is all about maintaining a high frequency of appearances on your fan’s News Feeds. But engaging your fan base isn’t the only way of keeping a strong appearance on News Feeds: it also has to do with what you post. You see, Facebook’s News Feed is based on an algorithm called EdgeRank which gives more weight to certain posts – meaning that, depending on what type of thing you post, Facebook will give it higher prevalence in your fan’s News Feeds.

There are (essentially) four types of posts you can make: you can post text, links, photos, or videos. Of the four, links, photos and videos have a much higher weight – meaning that these types of posts are more likely to show up on News Feeds than if you just post plain text. So whenever you post anything, even if it’s a very basic comment – perhaps announcing a deal at your facility, or thanking a loyal customer for frequenting your business – make sure to include a photo, link, or video to ensure it gets the highest exposure possible.

4. Timeliness

You can pull off #2 and #3 and get a high rank on the News Feed and still miss your fans’ attention if you don’t post when they’re on Facebook. The News Feed is based primarily on time – as more people post, your posts move down (and then off) the page – so you need to make sure that your posts go out when your fans will see them. Link-shortening and tracking service bit.ly has found that the optimal times to post to Facebook are between 8am and 8pm. Since your own users will access Facebook throughout those twelve hours, its best to post several times to make sure you catch them all; we recommend three posts a day.

Why not post every hour? Because flooding your fans’ News Feeds would be annoying and you’d likely have many “un-liking” you. You can find more exact numbers on which times to best reach your fans by examining your Page’s Insights to determine which posts get the most attention at which times.

5. Look professional

It’s called Face-book, isn’t it, so put on your best face! It’s absolutely inexcusable for your professional Facebook Page to look thrown-together and unprofessional.

First, your profile picture should be your facility’s logo. Profile pictures should be 200px x 200px – if you don’t have one that size on file either ask corporate headquarters for one or use an image manipulation program to scale it to the correct dimensions. Even if finding the right profile pic is a bit of work, it’s worth it, as it will also act as your thumbnail and will thus be the first representation of you that new users will see – if it’s blurry, the wrong size, or unrepresentative of your business it will be ignored.

Secondly, use a picture of your facility as your cover photo – facility pictures work well here because the cover photo’s strange dimensions (815px wide by 315px tall) are good for showing landscapes and buildings. Be sure to use a high-definition camera, as blurry pictures will instantly turn potential new fans away (dating sites have proven that suitors with higher-definition pictures land significantly more dates, so the same is probably true of storage facilities).

Finally, fill out all your information as completely and thoroughly as you can. State the mission and purpose of your business in the “About” section or else users won’t know why they should do business with you beyond Facebook. If you haven’t completed your contact information accurately, fans won’t know how to take the next step and actually rent from your facility!

Brian Shreckengast is a writer at SelfStorageDeals.com, the price-focused search engine for finding cheap self-storage units. Like Self Storage Deals on Facebook to receive more professional social media advice for your facility.