What I Learned From One Million Facebook Fans

Posted on | December 8, 2011 | 1 Comment

DiamondFans

A facebook page we started in March 2008, DiamondFans, has grown to over a million fans or “likes”. I’ve been talking about DiamondFans for a while and it’s been an wild ride up to this point. I’d say it’s become a great asset for my business and personal brand. If you’re looking for ways to benefit from your facebook page, I can only tell you how it’s helped me and Samuelson’s Diamonds.

1) PR

The page has gotten Samuelson’s Diamonds a tremendous amount of media coverage. From trade magazines to local and national publications, we’ve been there. Pretty cool for a 90 year old small family business to be ranked ahead of most national and international brands.

Click here for the press release titled, “Baltimore Jeweler Beating Ravens to 1 Million Fans on Facebook.”

2) RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

DiamondFans has gotten my foot in the door, meeting and building relationships with the best and brightest in the jewelry and tech industries. I’ve been a featured speaker at numerous jewelry trade shows and even shows like Etail. So I’m thankful for that and I’ve learned a lot and continue to learn from it. We have gained new clients and customers from all over the world and that has been unbelievable.

3) WEBSITE TRAFFIC

Let’s not kid ourselves. A page with a million fans generates some serious web traffic for whatever it is promoting. In this case it’s diamonds, diamond education, and my business of course. Back when facebook tracked IMPRESSIONS (which they do not do anymore), we were recieving 300,000 impressions per link. The clicks follow. Now facebook is tracking “people reached” and “people talking about this” which is actually a much more useful stat. I wonder if twitter could do this – which brings me to my next post which may be titled, “Is It Better To Have A Million Facebook Likes Or A Million Twitter Followers?”. Let’s just say this – a lot more people are reading our DiamondFans posts than most celebrity tweets. There aren’t many who even have a million followers. Tweets are really useless jumble compared to the interaction on a facebook page. It’s so much richer with pix, videos, comments, likes, etc.

4) INSIGHTS INTO TASTES AND TRENDS

If I ever want to know what kind of reaction a diamond or piece of jewelry will get, I poll the DiamondFans. I can see what metals, trends, diamond shapes and jewelry people “like” and I learn from it as a diamond dealer and jewelry retailer. You can’t ask for a better way to test the waters.

CONCLUSION

I know most people will be looking for #5 to be SALES. It really doesn’t have much to do with direct sales so if that’s all you’re looking for, you may not find it on a fan page. If you’re looking to communicate with your customers, pages are very effective. If you’re looking to get visitors to your website and more people to notice your brand, it’s great for that too. However, I do think that Facebook may build an easy, user friendly platform to sell product on your page. Some are doing it now but through outside apps which don’t seem to work as well – plus facebook can’t make any money from that. Either way, I do know that we are doing more business than we were 3 1/2 years ago.

So who knows where this will go? I’m loving it and I think it’s doing a lot of good for people who LOVE DIAMONDS LIKE ME!