December 5, 2011 by Mary Killelea
No matter what type of company you own, Facebook is a fantastic venue to market your business on. Facebook has over 800 million active users and according to http://www.socialbakers.com the average person spends about 55 minutes a day engaged on Facebook. Facebook allows every person to have a free profile but they make it clear that personal pages are for personal use only and they do NOT want you to promote your businesses through your profile. Facebook has created business pages for this purpose, making them equipped with business reporting tools, custom tabs, apps, and other business specific assets.
Why Market on Facebook? What you have to understand about Facebook is for many people, it’s become their virtual world.. that’s where they hang out with friends, family and engage with businesses. People’s expectations of businesses has changed over the past 5 years, now people want to engage with a business and expect for that business to be accessible and transparent thru social media, like Facebook, and Twitter. For this article we are focusing on Facebook.
People buy from companies they know and trust. Facebook provides businesses this ideal setting to extend your brand by creating a Facebook business page and tools to allow you to engage with customers on a one to one basis.
Facebook is a great place for small businesses because it levels the playing field no matter what size your company is you have the same resources to market side by side the big companies. You can find most of the top fortune 500 companies engaging with their fans (customers) on Facebook and take the time to watch and learn from them. Face it if the top companies in the country are utilizing Facebook to build relationships and establish repoire with their exiting and potential customers shouldn’t you as a small business.
Facebook business marketing is free and if you consider each person on average has 130 friends and when a person likes your page, you can market to them thru daily posts and when they like or comment on your posts, those interactions are shared with their friends now your message, brand, services and products have very high chance of being viewed by other liked minded friends who too can become fans and customers of yours.
As you can see the viral marketing effect of Facebook can be enormous but one essential thing to realize when marketing on Facebook, your efforts need to be sincere, your goals needs to be altruistic and your company needs to be transparent. Your marketing strategy should be focused on what solid, beneficial content can you share that will build repoire with your customers and start a dialogue, how can you connect with them in ways that your competition isn’t, what makes your business different. There is a great rule of thumb to follow it’s the 90/10 rule which means 90 percent of the time you are adding value and finding creative ways to connect with fans in an authentic way, 10 percent of the posts should be sales oriented.
One really important thing to recognize is that you want everyone that visits your Facebook business page to “Like” the page. This is achieved in a various ways but one of the most successful ways is to create a reveal tab that they land on by designating this in your settings. This reveal tab will be your first impression so it’s very important to make it a good one. You want to ask them to “Like” your page and offer them some type of incentive, the incentive or payoff is revealed to them once they have clicked the “Like” button. Most people will typically check out a companies business page and in less than 5 seconds decide whether or not they want to click “Like” and give you permission to market to them thru their news feed. “Liking” a business page is the equivalent of a person giving you an endorsement and allowing you to update them with news, information, tips and offerings similar to signing up for a newsletter.
As mentioned above having a business page is free. But when it comes to setting up a custom landing page with a reveal offer there are companies like ours that will design your custom Facebook business reveal tab for you if you are not tech savvy or there are tools out there that you can purchase and some that are even for free that allow you to set up the business custom tab yourself. It’s important to understand that you should optimize your business page with keywords that help identify your products or services as well as your company name so when people do searches for businesses on Facebook either by company name or keywords your company will come up. This can be achieved by thoroughly going through your set up steps and filling out all the information in the about us section and knowing that adding photos of your products and services is beneficial as well as who your page lists as their favorites can be strategic.
One of the best ways to get fans is by posting out as your page on other business pages. This is a powerful marketing strategy you can practice. This is achieved by identifying 5-6 other business pages that you think your potential customers visit, hang out or interact with. When you are on your business page you select “use Facebook as my business page” and then visit their pages see what the conversations are and interact and posts feedback and comments where appropriate. You will be amazed at how many companies will like your page just because they saw you engaging with them and others will visit your page because they saw you posting something interesting and want to learn more about you.
Facebook advertising is another incredible resource that businesses have today, like Google’s pay per click or adwords this is setup very similarly but the advantage that Facebook offers is that you have the ability to market to specific segments of people based on their likes and interests. When each person signs up and builds a profile on Facebook, they fill out a series of questions and over time people add interests and activities to their profiles as a means of enriching their virtual world presence. Facebook so brilliantly tracks all this data giving advertisers a huge advantage allowing them the ability to target VERY specific demographics making an ad campaign a great investment.
As a business owner Facebook can be daunting because there are tactics that are beneficial and tactics to avoid. In writing this article I hope I have shared the importance of getting into the game, and utilizing Facebook to market your business, convinced you it’s an amazing tool that can help grow your business, that there are differences between having a business page and profile page and what the value is in having a person “Like” your page.
Working Web Solutions has been in business for 10 years offering Web Design, SEO and Facebook Business Marketing, our motto is Your Success Is Our Success “Like” our business page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/webdesignandseo and visit us online at www.workingwebsolutions.com to watch a video about Facebook business marketing.
Below is a list of additional resources that I hope you find helpful.
Facebook Business Marketing www.facebook.com/business
Advertising Guidelines: www.facebook.comads_guidelines.php
Guide to Facebook Ads: www.facebook.com/adsmarketing
Advertising Help Center: www.facebook.com/adshelp
Create a Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Facebook Page Promotional Guidelines:www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php
Creating a custom Facebook Fan Page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84bEDBVmdsM&NR=1
Software to create a custom Facebook Fan Page http://www.fanpageengine.com
Software to create a custom Facebook Fan Page http://get10000fans.com/
Wildfire iFrames app (Contests etc.) http://www.wildfire.com
facebook business marketing, fan page marketing, internet marketing, portland internet marketing
