Should you promote your business on Facebook?

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the January 19, 2011 @ 3:01 pm

We all know about Facebook (it’s been around for a good few years now), it’s a good way to stay in touch with friends and relatives, but is it worth using for marketing your business? How many people are actually going to find you on there? And how do you go about using it anyway?

Why Facebook works

Facebook has over 500 million users worldwide of which 50% log on each day. That’s a lot of potential business! It’s well known that no matter how many reviews of products and services there are online or in magazines, consumers trust friends and family more than anyone else for opinions on just about anything, from where to take the kids for a day out to which surround sound system will make you jump out of your seat with each explosion. This doesn’t just work for B2C businesses, if someone you know recommends an accountant you’re likely to take note more than just seeing who comes top of your Google search.

On top of this, rightly or wrongly, Facebook holds an awful lot of data about each person who subscribes to the site. It uses this data to feed Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts to people; try changing your relationship status to single and you’ll be amazed at the number of dating sites that suddenly begin to stalk you around Facebook. Even something as small as mentioning liking cake will soon have local bakers offering you their wares via PPC.

Facebook as a marketing tool

There are two main ways of attracting business via Facebook; traditional PPC and the relatively new ‘fan pages’.

PPC works in a similar way to Google Adwords, you sign up and pay a fee to Facebook each time someone clicks on your ad. You can target your market within Facebook’s set parameters, for example a business selling protein shakes may specify males aged between 18 – 35 living in the south of England who say they like going to the gym.

A fan page is an advancement on the older style ‘groups’ that could be joined. By setting up a fan page you can invite people to ‘like’ your business or product and regularly update your status as you would your own profile in order to tell your fans about new products, services or just what you’ve been up to that day. These updates will then appear in their newsfeed, allowing your fans to comment on your status which then appears in their friends’ newsfeed and the word begins to spread. Viral marketing at its best.

How to use Facebook for your business

So where do you begin. Follow these 8 steps to get you started:

1. Decide what you want to achieve from Facebook – do you want to increase brand awareness, encourage more hits to your website or maybe use it for feedback on your product or service? Are you going to use fan pages, PPC or both?
2. When using a fan page, brand it – Facebook does have some limits when it comes to branding your page but make sure you have your logo uploaded and up to date company information available
3. Ask for fans and more fans –begin with people you know on Facebook. Get them to become fans by inviting them via your fan page; then encourage them to invite more people. There’s nothing wrong in posting ‘Please invite your friends to become a fan’ as your status. It’s blatant but it works
4. Update your status regularly, upload photos and videos – don’t go mad and start spamming people as you can and will be reported to Facebook and your page removed, but an update a day is acceptable, and will keep your business fresh in your fans minds
5. Interact with your fans – this is a great way of really finding out who your customers are and what they want from your business. If someone comments on your status, reply to them. Post polls asking for opinions on your products. Get debates going between your fans on relevant subjects
6. Include a call to action – there’s no point having all these fans if you don’t send them to your website every now and then. Again don’t spam them with your web address every hour but a gentle reminder of where they can buy your product or service should increase your websites hit rate
7. PPC can be used as a call to action to send people directly to your website or to your fan page; either way it should increase your number of visitors, your brand awareness and your sales
8. Promote other social media activity. If you have videos on YouTube embed those in your page,  you can also integrate your Facebook status updates with your Twitter updates using tools like Tweetdeck

For more information on using Facebook as a marketing tool, or for help setting up a marketing campaign contact us here.

Tags: facbook