So we started our own little business back in April organising events - small scale stuff....we aren't going to be arranging the next rival to Glastonbury!! Family based things, fun, craft, that sort of thing. With no massive budget for advertising we have relied on spreading the word online and I thought I would share my experience of using Facebook for drumming up a following.
First of all, do not attach your business page to your personal profile. Set a new one up and keep that profile for business purposes too. Whilst a lot of people will never bother looking at the profile attached to a page, just as many will and nothing looks less professional than someone clicking over just to see you lying comatose at a BBQ last summer lol. If you are trying to put this across as a trustworthy business, you must make sure that you represent yourself online as this.
Describe what you do well and use tags. Don't assume your name says it all - people will want to know why they should deal with you and what you have to offer them.
Facebook really pushes uses their advertising options. My advice is....DON'T. I am as guilty as everyone of ignoring adverts that pop up all over the place when I am trying to find something online and this is definitely the case on FB. I did try it at the start but at a cost of anything up to about $0.99 dollars just to get someone to click on your page, not to actually click on an action button, it is really not worth it. You are encouraged to make your search more targeted by specifying your target audience based on their interests but this clearly only applies if people have actually gone through and picked them for their profile. I know I have never done that. You can very easily find yourself out £100 or more and have little to no benefit from it.
Join groups - spend time searching for groups in your location, groups of people who are interested in the same thing you are selling or doing, find another business page and see the sort of thing they have liked. Join them and announce yourself - tell people what you are doing. It doesn't cost anything but time, but I have found that this has yielded much greater benefits that anything paid.
Make your posts engaging - be informative, be funny, be current.....you are competing with thousands of other business/pages online so you need to have something which will make people take the time to read what you are going to say. Keep it short and sweet, and post more often. You will keep people interested and make them want to keep finding out what you are doing/what is coming next.
Think of simple ways to bring people into your "fold" - we did a very simple competition offering a small value supermarket voucher and a bottle of wine and got hundreds of followers out of that. People LOVE to get something for nothing - so set a target for the number of "Likes" you will give your prize away and announce it. You will get people who might not necessarily be hugely interested in what you are offering still giving you a like BUT it means that your posts will appear on their Newsfeed and for every post they do like and share, you will also get exposure amongst their friends.
Another way is to give away a prize by setting someone who is interested in what you offer a target to get a certain number of likes for your page in return for that prize. You are essentially, then, getting this person to act as a human advertisement for what you do.
Last little snippet, make sure you set up auto responses on your messages/messenger. This keeps your response rate up - I am definitely one of those people that wouldn't bother trying to contact a business that had a low rate. It isn't always possible to respond within minutes so let the automated option do it for you. This let's people know you are interested in receiving their correspondence and in replying to it. Make it friendly - FB offers the option of personalising it to the individual contacting you and entering your name in it.
Good luck with your new venture!! Will share more info as ours develops :)