How to Market Effectively on Facebook
Facebook should be seriously considered as part of your marketing mix for several reasons. First, Facebook is a large and rapidly growing social network. Second, it excels at providing the ability to precisely target your advertising messages for the demographics you need. For example, if you want to reach women under the age of thirty-five who shop at Whole Foods, you can.
Another benefit of Facebook is its flexibility from a marketing perspective. Not only can you promote your business using fan pages, but you can use interactive polls, promote special events, and promote content or simply give visitors a simple way to sample what you have to offer.
What’s the best way to market effectively on Facebook? Here are some useful tips:
Set Your Objective
Decide on what the objective is of your presence on Facebook. For example, is it to increase awareness of your company, to find marketing partners, or to simply keep your market aware of new products or services as they are announced?
Develop a Plan
Jumping in by creating a Facebook presence without having a plan is like getting on a plane and telling the pilot you don’t care where he goes. Some of the things a basic Facebook marketing plan should include are a clear understanding of what your unique selling proposition is, identification of your target market, and a content creation schedule.
Use Facebook Advertising
Because of its ability to laser target specific audiences, Facebook advertising provides a highly effective marketing method.
Take Names
Get your Facebook audience to register and sign up for ongoing communications from you. A list is a highly valuable marketing asset. Unfortunately, many businesses spend thousands of dollars a month on marketing and fail to build a list. Having a list of people you can regularly communicate with reduces your marketing costs and increases the likelihood people will do business with you. One reason is because consumers are barraged by thousands of messages each day. To penetrate this barrier, ongoing communications is necessary.
Promote Content Off of Facebook to Build Awareness
If you regularly publish content off of Facebook, such as on your blog, promote the content with a link to your blog from Facebook. Linking to your blog increases awareness of the blog and resulting prospect engagement.
Facebook is much more than a platform to engage with your friends and have ongoing dialogs. Learn and apply tips, such as the ones provided here, and your Facebook marketing will be much more effective.
Interact Regularly
Effective social media doesn’t involve one way, self-serving promotion. Effective social media engages people in a conversation. One easy way to engage them is to simply ask interesting or controversial questions.
Call to Action
Give people a clear and compelling reason to become fans. For example, you might give them a free report or a sample of what you offer. When you offer them something, make sure you have a clear call to action.
Use Graphics
When providing Facebook updates, use photos and other graphics. Graphics will help gain a reader’s attention and make you stand out. Graphics will also make your update more memorable and differentiate you from other updates that are plain text.
Use Custom Tabs
Use custom tabs to increase the likelihood you will engage others. Custom tabs could include a welcome page and a special “about us” page. Using custom tabs often increases the time a person spends learning about you and exploring your Facebook presence.
Post Consistently and Regularly
Writing a lot of posts in one week and then not posting for months will not build an audience. To engage your audience, they need to see regular communications so they want to keep coming back for more.