The 3 reasons why you should launch your page before your local business

Reason #1 : Teasing 

Seems obvious, but the first benefit of having a page ready to go at the very beginning of your project is the teasing capacity of the page. You could, for example, talk about the building of your physical store, for a lil bit of story telling (people love story telling). Moreover, if we consider that you're going to open a Facebook page first, Facebook is a nice place to talk about "new projects", and Zuckie's social network gives you some nice tools to promote your business even before it started, to allow you to earn some money.  Well.. if you're willing to put some money of yours in the balance. I'm of course talking about Facebook Ads my friends.

They allow you to specify the target you wanna reach  with segmentation features. So, for example, if you're opening a skateboard specialized shop, you could focus your sponsored posts on people interested in skateboards, street style and urban sports. And there you go, you have you first relevant content before selling to your first clients. 

Here's a perfect example of pre-opening communication on Facebook, with our good friends from L'Heure du Singe, a bar located in Toulouse (FR).

Reason #2 : Maximum engagement 

And that's a perfect transition to our second point : engagement. As we said on a previous article, your first fans are your best fans, and more importantly your first ambassadors. When you launch a Facebook page, your first fans often tend to be your friends/relatives/family. And that's not a bad thing, even if you could think that you won't easily reach other people if your fan base is only composed of people you personally know. WRONG. And for a simple reason.

These fans will be more likely willing to share, comment, spread the world about your project. And by "using" these friends to good use, you can automatically reach a large amount of people, simply because their own Facebook friends will learn about you. Fan #1 is the best fan ever. Creating a solid fan base at the very beginning of your project is hella important, because you'll need them when your physical store opens its doors. 

Reason #3 : Being in the know instead of... 

... trying to catch up. This #reason is debatable, because you'll always be able to catch up, even if your page is not created from the beginning of your adventure. But still, think a lil bit about the first clients you will have. You'll need a way to contact them, to keep them in touch with your activity. And what better place than a Facebook page for that? Your first clients have to be the ones that are going to come back, because just like your friends who liked you page at the beginning, they're going to become your strongest ambassadors.

At the end of the day, it's all about creating customer loyalty, and Facebook has proven to be one of the best (if not the best) tools to succeed in creating loyalty. So engage your very first clients to like your page, to become followers of your Instagram account, etc. And what better tools to encourage people to like/follow your page than our counters? Just sayin' .. 😉 

Hope this article helped to convince you that you definitely need to think about launching a social media page before opening your business ! And please tell us if you happen to have short-term business plans ! 

I'm out 😉