Sometimes, even when in my head I know something can work really well, it can still astound me the success that can be achieved when it is worked at properly.

Exactly 1 month ago today, I ran a training session for a client on Facebook, and how to utilise it for their business. To be frank, there was a bit (well a lot) of scepticism about it. I am sure he won’t mind me saying, but the MD of the company was of the mindset that Facebook is somewhere his kids hang out and waste lots of time, not somewhere he saw his business going. However, he was open to be proved wrong.

And boy has that really started to happen!

So, on the 10^th February, straight after the training session, a Facebook Business Page was set up. Within about a week 45 people had ‘liked’ the page. Not a bad first week. 62 active users, and a total of 484 visits in a week.

A good start, but not as good as they had hoped. They were posting some great events they were involved in, along with photos of the team, and were getting comments and likes on the posts they made. But there didn’t seem to be a huge growth in the number of ‘likes’.

Then they started to publicise that they were on Facebook to their Twitter Followers, and put a Facebook button on the website. On Tuesday of this week, suddenly the number of people who liked the page had jumped to 239. Good work! With 842 visits, and 49 wall posts or comments over the week things were looking up.

But they still weren’t happy.

With a new event that they were sponsoring coming up in a couple of months, we talked about having a photo competition, and using Facebook as the mechanism to do this, taking the winner from the photo that had the most likes. At 4.15pm today an email was sent out to their EXISTING database (which to be fair is quite enormous!) to tell them that they were on Facebook and to come and ‘Like’ their page. At 4.30 I received an email from them asking for me to get involved in their internal sweepstake on how many fans they would have by 9am Monday morning. In just 15 minutes from the email going out, they had jumped to 344 already.

Being the ever pessimistic person I am, I guessed 743.

I have already lost. It is only 8.40pm. The number of people who now like the page is at 818 and rising. Every time I look at the page, it has increased by at least 10. But not only that, the number of posts and comments is increasing, so people are not just liking the page, they are also engaging and leaving some amazing feedback about the company!

So what is the lesson here?

Well, this is not the intended lesson but always have an open mind. Just because you have a perception that something will not work for your business, doesn’t mean it won’t. Sometimes you have to try something to know what results it will bring.

But the key lesson here is, don’t always think you have to find NEW fans or followers. Are you making sure you are connecting with those who are already fans of your business, but just don’t know that you are ‘online’ yet? I have heard many times that it is much easier to sell more to an existing client than it is to find new ones. So are you making the most of the clients and contacts you already have, rather than chasing around finding new people to add to your ever growing network?

P.S. It has now hit 899 likes. It is not often I am happy to lose, but this is definitely one of those times.