Leads.

You want to know where to find some?

You want to find them easily?

Simple. Let them find you.

I’ll tell you how in a second, but first… I am Ron Ramsden, I am a DYB coach, also a painting contractor here in Northern Massachusetts.

What if I told you, you can attract an abundance of leads just by using Facebook?

You may be saying, “I don’t want to spend any time on Facebook.”

Maybe you know someone that practically lives on Facebook and you’re like, “nope, it’s not for me.”

Let me change your mind.

By the end of 2017, a total of 2.2 billion people worldwide are on Facebook.

Here’s the big catch: Facebook is FREE, and so is a Facebook Business Page.

The only time it costs you money is if you actually want to boost a post or pay for an ad and there is no reason to do that when starting out.

You have more than enough advantage in just having a free Facebook page.

You can think about paying for ads later on, but to get the groundwork going, all you need is a free Facebook page.

Here are some other stats you’ll want to know:

58% of the world is on the internet

81% of Americans are on Facebook

That’s a pretty significant amount of people!

Also, the highest traffic time worldwide during the day is between 1 and 3 o’clock.

Those are some good things to know, but what you need to remember is:

2.2 billion people are on Facebook, and some of those people are your customers.

First of all, we have to build up a few stats for your page:

1. How many people see your page and like your page
2. How many people that like your page, scroll down and actually look at more of your page and engage.

You can’t just start a business page and put a couple of pictures and videos out there; it takes a little more work than that.

If you want to learn how to make videos for your Facebook page click here.

RELATED: 2 Way to Increase your Facebook Page Likes

As far as facebook, once a week, sit down and plan it out, it’ll take about 30-45 minutes.

Tip #1: Invite all of your friends on Facebook to like your page.

First of all, you want to go to your business page, underneath your cover photo you’ll see three little dots.

Press it and then scroll all the way to the bottom.

You’ll see some people are green, these are your friends who like your page.

Then you’ll also see circles, these are your friends on Facebook.

Certainly invite them! They already know you, it shouldn’t be hard to get them to like your page.

Even if they are just acquaintances add them anyways, they may know someone who would like your page.

Make sure you are always connecting with new people.

Tip #2: If you are in any kind of networking group, be sure to like the other person’s page and then invite them to like your page, 9 times out of 10 they’ll return the favor!

It is the simple law of reciprocity: the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit.

You’ll find that when you provide value to another, you’ll receive the same value!

Tip #3: If you have good relationships with past customers, invite them!

If you get along great with your customers, and you know you provided great value to them, invite them to like your page.

What’s the worst they can say… “no”?

You are not asking them to go on a date, you are asking them to like your business page.

Connect with fellow contractors, the plumber, the painter, the electrician, you can like each other’s pages.

After all, you are working in the same business fair, you can probably share contacts that way as well.

Engagement.

I cannot stress how important engagement is when racking up leads.

Let me tell you about a story that has to do with engagement…

3 weeks ago, I was at my lake house, it was on a Saturday, I was walking around the house, it was snowing outside and I noticed I had a Facebook message when I sat down for lunch.

I looked at the message, it was actually from a local contractor and he told me he was looking for a painter.

I called him right away, he asked me to call him later on that day, and he said, “I’m not happy with the painter I have right now, I’ve gone through a couple over the last year,” and he tells me it was either his mom or his mother-in-law that follows our business page.

She said, “we’ve been following them for a while and we love their work, give them a call!”

Within the past 3 weeks, from this connection, we’ve had contracts for a little over $20,000 worth of work, you can’t tell me engagement doesn’t work.

What kind of things should you be posting?

Fun things for one, if you are a painter, you’ve got a lot of before and after pictures, everybody likes to look at those.

We, of course, want to get the people engaged if you’re going to post a picture of a kitchen you are going to be painting, say something like, “guess what color we’re going to be painting this.”

You can even say, “Who can guess how much this will cost to paint?”

Price is not a secret, remember that.

Always look for ways to make it fun, what you want to do is engage the audience.

Try, “caption this,” maybe it’s a funny picture you post.

One time I put a skeleton on a ladder when we were working in a theatre and posted a picture.

We actually re-used it at Christmas and said, “caption this.”

We also gave an incentive, whoever had the best caption won a $10 or $15-dollar gift card to Starbucks.

One other great way to engage your followers is when someone comments or makes a caption for a photo, thank them for guessing or comment on it.

You are going to get a lot more engagement when you start doing this.

Here’s the best part: Facebook is going to bring you closer to the top of everyone’s news feed the more you engage!

So, you’ve got to have a caption contest, you can also have another kind of contest, one of the things we did was, “how many gallons to paint this house?”

As I shared in the past video, we did a condominium association.

We were only caulking the windows, so we said, “guess how many tubes it’ll take to caulk this.”

I believe it was about 180 something tubes.

So we asked them to guess and also tag us, this has worked for many, many other contractors in the DYB group!

Here is another awesome way to get them engaged while getting some free advertisement:

“If you can find and take a picture of one of our vans or trucks and post it, you will win [insert prize here].

Maybe it’s a can of custom cookies, or apple pie, which is what I give out.

Maybe it’s a $10 local gift card or $5 local gift card.

Nothing too crazy, and this way people actually share your page, they are going to be posting things on your page and their friends are also going to see it, they are going to see that so and so won $10.

Their friends are going to go like your page, so you want to be interactive and always thank them for commenting.

Jumping back to inviting friends: when someone likes your page, it’s okay to thank them for liking your page.

You can even create a post every now and then thanking whoever because their friends are actually going to see that and maybe they’ll like your page too!

Tip #4: Go LIVE on Facebook.

This may be scary for some people that don’t know when or where to do it.

I have done it multiple times.

Part of our business is working in condominium complexes, so when we are working outside of the complex, I would walk around and go live.

The key to this is if you know ahead of time that you are going to go live, even if it’s 5 minutes or if it’s a half hour ahead of time, post on your business page: “Ramsden painting is going live in a new condo project in 5 minutes.”

You’ll be surprised at how many people jump on to watch!

People love to watch, if you think about it, they spend a lot of time watching TV.

Many love watching those kinds of things, they never know what’s going to happen.

When we go live, we’ll do a walk around.

If we’re in a home, we never give the address, of course, we never show anything personal, but if we’re painting part of a home, I would go live in that home.

If we are doing new construction or maybe a big addition that has some funky things going on that maybe would capture someone’s eye, we would go live.

As you get started people will join the viewing and most will leave comments, tell them hello, try to get the conversation started.

You want engagement, Facebook absolutely LOVES whenever someone goes live.

You are most definitely going to be brought right to the top of everyone’s feed when you go live.

What else can you do when you go live?

Go around and introduce your crew, you maybe go up and interview one of your crew members.

Maybe ask them 2 or 3 questions, or maybe “hey, what’s your name, how long have you been working here, what do you like doing best around here, what’s your favorite thing to paint?”

Also, show your viewers what a typical day looks like.

I have done this many times, I would walk and do an estimate while live.

This is also a great way to interact with your customers.

What you really want to do is engage with these customers.

Creating a relationship with your customers isn’t going to happen overnight, but it will slowly pick up and your page likes will get higher and higher and higher!

Those are my tips for gaining leads on Facebook.

Remember: the more you post, the more engagement you’ll get, the more friction you’ll get and you will rise to the top.

One other thing is that you can schedule your post on Facebook.

This is an extra tweak, you can sit down sometime, any day of the week and you can actually take pictures from the course of the week and you can post them.

Put a little caption on there and then you can schedule when you want those to go out.

If you navigate to the insights tab on your business page, you can look at each day, and you can actually see when most of your viewers are online.

You’ll find that Facebook is a very powerful tool!

Things will vary every few weeks so be sure to stay on top of it.

But let me just say… I would not have landed a $20,000 job plus a new person to work with, as well as a new customer in less than a month if it weren’t for having a Facebook business page.

Anyways, I am Ron, I am a DYB coach, also a painting contractor up here in Massachusetts, if you want to reach me, you can email me at ron@dybcoach.com as many of you have.

You can also find me on Facebook, send me a message, if you have any questions, you want to send me a message or something like that, I’d love to help you out.

I help painters work on their business so they don’t have to work in the business.

You have a great day and start getting engaged on Facebook. Take care.