The amount of formality expected out of businesses has, in many ways, declined over the years. Some of this has to do with the fact that there are so many different interesting things on the internet to look at that nobody really wants to sit around and read bland business copy about products.

If you’re using Facebook to promote your business, you may want to reconsider being strictly professional and loosen up a little bit to make your posts more interesting.

An Example

George Takei has a very popular Facebook page. Sometimes he does promote himself and productions that he is participating in in some way. Other times, he’ll promote other productions that he finds interesting. If you happen to be a follower of George Takei on Facebook, however, you’ll find that his posts are most often ones that have nothing to do with promoting at all.

Takei has a knack for latching onto the latest things on the internet, and most are quite funny. He posts a regular stream with updates several times a day, most of the time. His page is very informal, very fun and does an excellent job of keeping his name in front of people.

Before you imitate Takei thinking you’ll be an overnight success, remember that he is most famous for playing Sulu on Star Trek, which means that he has a fan base with a loyalty that is virtually unrivaled in the entertainment world. It is possible, however, to borrow elements of this strategy for your own Facebook promotion purposes and to make your page a bit more fun for people.

Breaking the Mold

If you want to adopt this strategy, you have to break out of the mold of thinking that writing a post with value means writing something about your brand 100% of the time. Occasionally write posts that are fun or interesting that have absolutely nothing to do with your hotel or restaurant. If people liked your page, they’re obviously already aware of who you are. How people engage on Facebook spans across the board, so your content can and should, too.

A more conventional strategy would be to find interesting things to post that do involve your brand but that do not directly try to sell to anyone. For example, if you sold sports equipment, you might put interesting news about sports up on your feed once in a while but not directly promote your product in any way. You’re still branding in that you are helping people to associate your product with sports but you’re not directly giving a sales pitch, which means they’re less likely to get annoyed with your post.

Separate Voices

If you have a domain for your business, remember that it might be more appropriate to be formal on that domain and less formal on the Facebook page. Some WordPress templates allow you to push content from your webpage onto your Facebook page. It might be a good idea to do this if what you post on your site is appropriately formal, but doing the opposite might not be appropriate all the time.

Facebook provides a different venue to advertise on than your own domain. It also has different rules and expectations among its users. Be sure you separate the two and you should be able to get quite a bit of return on investment out of both.

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This post was contributed by Anny Solway. Anny is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates professional WordPress themes that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.