Welcome to my very first "Answering Clients' Questions within 10 Minutes.” I tried to record this before within 5 and no matter how hard I tried, I would not get it within five. So, you know what, we are just going to do it within magic number 10. This is the question that we are going to talk about today. I got this as a text message from a client. It says, "Hi Rachel, I thought of putting a post on our Facebook business page asking for help spreading the word about a retreat and sharing the link to the event. My question is, is that acceptable within Facebook guidelines. I seem to remember they don't like redirecting people off Facebook. If you have a better strategy or recommendation, I'm interested to learn more." 

When I get messages like this, what I can easily do is just look at that and I could just respond back to the main question, but I have found that there is always additional value to be added if you really dissect the message. Let's go ahead and do that. 

The first thing it says is, "I had a thought to put a post on my Facebook business page asking for help spreading the word about our retreat." Here's the thing with that. You don't ever really want to put things on a business page asking for help unless it is for a charity, or an event (outside of you), or support someone. The reason why is this. Your social media pages are really your marketing piece. it is your website. It is your first version, kind of, your website or another version of your website. You want the content on there to constantly be for people who could be prospects, current clients, past clients, referral partners to learn more about what you do and why you are the expert. Going on that page and saying, "Hey! help us spread the word about this event" it can come off as either you're not good enough, you can't fill events, you need help. We want to keep that as far away from your business as possible.  

Now what you can do is post about your event on your business page and then you can share it on to your personal page and then that is where you can do the ask, cuz you're asking from your network. That is where you say, "Hey, we are at 6 people, and we need 12 (or whatever it is) please help us." You can ask that ask when you have that relationship in the personal network. Now you want to be careful because you don't want to overflood constantly your network like that because they won't pay attention to it anymore. You want to be really cautious of how often and how much you're asking for help in that way.  

The other thing that you can do is you can take the post on your business page about the event and you can share that in a direct message. That would look like either to a person or to a group message or something like that. Within the message, you want to do two things. You want to make it super easy for them and you want to give options. People love options. It's kind of a choose-your-own-adventure on how you feel best about helping me kind of thing. This is how that can go. Option 1 can be, "Can you share this link through text message or email with people you think it might help?" And if you do that, you want to make sure you put the exact link to the event. Again, make it easy for them. Two, is you can say to them, "Can you please go to this post and tag anyone that you think might find this beneficial?"   

Then, again, you want to make sure that you put the link so it's really easy. And this is the link to the post that you talked about that event on your business page. When you click share on a post you can pull the link and then you want to copy that link into that message. The third option is really important. This option is, "If you are not sure who to invite or are unclear what this event is, we would love to answer any questions." Then you want to give them ways and times to contact you. A lot of times people will not contact because they are afraid that it is a bad time, or is after hours, or it is the weekend. You really want to make it easy for them. Contact me anytime. I'm up late. I'm doing this. Give them options on ways they can contact you and make him feel completely comfortable in contacting you. A lot of times that's what happens is that we as the person who's putting on the event or the person who has a business we just assume everyone understands it but a lot of the times people don't. Giving people the option to be able to learn more, is a way to open stop, and get more referrals. That talks about the first thing he talked about which was spreading the word and asking for help.  

Now, again, if I would have had gone and answer the main question I would have missed everything that I just shared with you. Which is why is important to really go section, by section, by section. The question is, "Is it acceptable within Facebook guidelines, I seem to remember they don't like redirecting people off Facebook" A hundred percent right  Facebook does not like people going off of Facebook. They like the little Facebook ecosystem. If you post out about 5% of your content, you are usually completely fine. So 5% of your post are links out - totally acceptable. I have not seen Facebook penalized for anything like that. Now how you can get away with having less link out, is by doing events within Facebook and then when you go to that it has the link out to the event. You can have to look depending on what you are doing if you can use anything within Facebook to then link to your post and then links out. Just something to kinda consider on that. Now, some people right now are going, "Oh my gosh Rachel! I blog. I vlog. I write articles. I want to link them out!"  You really need to decide what is  time versus effort and where that breakpoint is. If you are posting articles and you want to post the links out to all your articles and it's easier that way just it. Don't worry as much about the algorithm. If you want to, you can do a little synopsis of it with an image and then in the comments put a link out and say, "In the comments is the link." You can do things like that if you feel so inclined. Some people have done it where they have said, "Click the picture to get the link" and they put the link in the description of the photo. There are other things you can kinda do to play around and it just depends if you have the time and it's worth it the input to do all. What I mean by the input is the by time you put in you going to get that money back because of the value. Now, doing research of client's post, I will tell you that usually post with photos let's say if one got 11% if I added a link in there it usage drops down to about 6%. So you're probably losing half of your organicness by putting a link in because the Facebook likes the ecosystem. Just something to think about. For me, I have noticed that if I post a YouTube video, like if I record a video like this and then post on Facebook I'll hardly get any interaction. But if I record it and upload it straight to Facebook and it gets more. Again, you just have to figure out where that balance is and what works for you.  

"Any other strategies or better recommendations of how to do this?" The biggest recommendation I have is that you really want your page to have really good content. You want to be helpful. You want to have information. And then have your website set up to where if someone goes to your site to check you out because now they're interested in you, it shows right away your events. Right away the next steps. Right there upfront. I know this client that sent me this doesn't have it all set up yet. But we haven't really started working together yet. We are set to start in a few weeks but  who I am, I start to give value right away. I'm answering these questions now even though we're not technically started yet. That's one of the first things that I am going to be looking at is that flow because when I want you to the site I really didn't get all these events until he sent me a direct link and when that happened it took me to a subsite on a sub thing. Those can be integrated and there's probably reasons that they are using it and so we're just going to integrate what they have just a little more seamlessly. You also can put links to like your events and stuff within your description on your Facebook page Instagram that kind of thing  They make a little mini kind Link Pages where you would have links to all your stuff. You might have seen those on Instagram. People sometimes use them. If you are interested in that - how you have one short URL then when someone goes to it. It goes to a list of how they can contact you and quick links, let me know and I'm happy to do a video on that.  

That is another way. Is that you can put in all of your about the information or the link straight to your event and then on your posts you can talk about it and say, "The link to sign up is in our about." That is another way that you can link out without putting the link in the post. Direct them where it is. "It is on the front page of our website." "It is in our about information." Whatever it is. So yes, it does take them an extra little step and that's okay. Also, on Facebook there's a Facebook button. You can change your Facebook button to sign-up and that can go to your event page signup, so a lot of people have it as going to their website or something like that. You can change it as many times as you want. So, if you want to change it to be a signup button, you can do that as well. It's being a little creative of where you can put the links and also looking at the flow of how people will get from you to the event. Helpful information to wanting to work with you to sign up for your event. We are right at 10 minutes so I gotta jet. I hope that has been of value and help. Please let me know any thoughts you have.