Is your funeral home thinking about entering the world of social media?

If you are, then here’s my first tip for you: get on Facebook! Why should Facebook be your top choice? For starters, it’s the largest social network in the world.

• 93% of adults in the U.S. who use the Internet are on Facebook. (source)
• There are more than 1 billion people actively using Facebook monthly (source)
• 42% of marketers consider Facebook critical for their business. (source)

If those numbers don’t speak for themselves, I’ve also got 8 no-brainer reasons why your funeral home should get on Facebook!

 

1. Receive Exposure Through Word of Mouth Marketing

One of Facebook’s greatest strengths is its power to facilitate word-of-mouth marketing. It’s also the #1 network people turn to when talking about the passing of a loved one and sharing details about funeral services to family and friends.

So when someone on Facebook talks about their loved one’s funeral service, more than just their immediate family and friends will learn about it. In the picture below, this user announced the wake and funeral for his friend would be taking place at Stafford Funeral Home. This specific user has 1,200+ Facebook friends, so that’s 1,200+ more people who are getting exposure to your funeral home!

 

2. Build Deeper Relationships with Families in Your Area

When you create your Facebook business page, you will want to set it up as a “Professional Service” under Local Business. This will help families researching funeral homes in your area to discover you quickly on Facebook.

Unlike your website – which will need to be more focused on what you can do for families – your Facebook profile will allow your audience to connect with your funeral home on a more personal level.

For starters, you can let families get a feel for your funeral home and the people that will be working with them by using a timeline cover image like French Funeral Home did (below).

 

You can get even more personal by talking about the people who will be directly involved in a funeral service. Here, you can see how Spicer-Mullikin Funeral Homes highlights one of their funeral assistants:

 

 

To maintain a strong relationship with families, make sure you interact with them as much as possible by responding to posts they make on your wall such as this one on the Moloney Funeral Home page:

 

 

3. Attract Families to Your Funeral Home Through Facebook

Not sure if having a presence on Facebook will actually increase the number of families coming to your funeral home? Here are some stats that should help.

Did you know that…

• 77% of B2C companies have acquired customers through Facebook. (source)
• 33% of people in the US have made a purchase based on recommendations from friends on Facebook. (source)
• 51% of consumers said they were more likely to buy a product or service after becoming a fan on Facebook. (source)

This means that there is a good likelihood that people will choose your funeral home simply because their friends used it and recommend it on Facebook.

You can increase the odds that families will contact you after finding you on Facebook by setting up your Facebook page as a Local Business (as mentioned earlier) and adding your address and phone number on your page when you set it up.

You can see how it will be displayed by looking at the Walker Funeral Home page below:

 

You can also enable the message feature (also shown above) so that people can message you privately on Facebook. You can find this setting under “Manage Permissions” area of the Admin panel of your Facebook page. If you choose to do this, be sure to check your messages frequently – you never want to leave your social media audience hanging!

Facebook also helps you get more visibility in search engines, which could help attract even more families who are using Google to find funeral homes in their area. Your page can be particularly useful if people are searching for you by name, especially if you do not have a complete website just yet.

4. Get Involved in Your Community

When you become a useful resource for families in your area, they will keep you top of mind when they need a funeral service provider or need to give a recommendation to a friend.

O’Connor Mortuary is a great example of a funeral home who positions them as a helpful resource for families, especially during their grief.  The folks over at O’Connor Mortuary write blog posts on grief and healing and share them with their Facebook fans.

 

 

5. Easily and Affordably Advertise Your Funeral Home Online

If the thought of creating a Google AdWords campaign as part of your marketing strategy terrifies you (and your budget), then Facebook Ads can be a great alternative. Instead of just targeting keywords that could bring in irrelevant traffic to your website, you can easily target your Facebook Ad to the specific demographic your families live in, right down to the zip code.

 

Compare the suggested bid on Facebook to the cost per click (or CPC) of a Google AdWords advertisement for “lancaster funeral home.”

 

As an added bonus, your ads will be shown to people in your location whenever your potential families are logged into Facebook, unlike Google ads that are only shown when someone searches for a particular keyword phrase.

 

6. Get Testimonials from Your Families

Having a Facebook page makes it easy to get testimonials from families who have used your funeral home. People who are connected to your Facebook page and have a good experience with your funeral home will likely come back to share their experience like this family has done on the Williams Funeral Home page.

As mentioned earlier, 33% of people in the U.S. have made a purchase based on recommendations from friends on Facebook. So when someone sees that their friend recommended your funeral home online, they’ll be much more likely to choose you.

7. Do Market Research

The best way to find out what kinds of posts your families want to see on your Facebook page is to ask them. As you grow your fanbase on Facebook, you can occasionally ask questions in your status updates to learn more about your families. Looking again at the Williams Funeral Home page, they incorporate a question as they share content from their website.

 

This helps them simultaneously share their content and find out if it is valuable to the families in their area. You can also ask questions to test whether your families want things like online memorials, help with creating memorial videos, and other services.

 

8. Get People to Read Your Content

If your funeral home maintains a blog or has a newsletter (which you should!), you can use your Facebook page as a distribution channel to reach more families with your content. We use Facebook to promote content for the funeralOne blog, and it generates more than half of our blog traffic!

You can take it a step further by paying to promote your post on Facebook. This will ensure that your content will reach the largest audience possible.

 

At the end of your promotion, you can see how many clicks, photo views and page “likes” you got from your promotion. We’ve never spent more than $30 on promoting a post, and have seen great results from it so far!

 

 

Ready to get started on Facebook?

It’s super easy to set-up your funeral home’s Facebook page, just click here to get started!

Need some more resources on Facebook and social media?

Check these articles out:

– 4 Secrets to Successfully Marketing Your Funeral Home on Facebook
– 5 Social Media & Funeral Marketing Examples You Can Actually Use
– How Social Media Creates Authenticity in the Funeral Profession
– What Ryan Thogmartin Can Teach You About Funeral Social Media

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joe Joachim is the CEO and Founder of funeralOne, the first global solutions firm leading a movement of change for the funeral profession. For the past 10 years, he’s developed game-changing solutions that help funeral professionals increase the value of their service offerings, connect with the families of today, and become more profitable. funeralOne’s solutions include: website design, aftercare, funeral eCommerce, and personalization software. Connect with Joe on Google+.