Using facebook for marketing

Understandably, social media marketing and Facebook in particular is the answer to next gen marketing and the reason why everyone is eager to join the bandwagon.However, you must still work on your marketing campaign to achieve your goals. Facebook is a tool that you can use to accelerate the campaign. For a Facebook campaign to be successful, you must understand the goals of your campaign.

Askyourself questions like: Do you want to reach new customers or existing ones? Do youexpect to generate direct revenue from this campaign? Are you trying to increase yourreferral business? Are you trying to reposition your brand or product? Do you want toimprove the customer perception about your customer service? Are you trying toestablish a platform for your future products or services?

Answering these questions will help you decide how aggressive your marketing strategies should be. Design your marketing strategy bearing in mind that Facebook is an interactive medium.

Potential to reach millions of people is made possible through Facebook. You can market your product through Facebook pages. A page can have unlimited number of fans. When you start building your fan page, invite all your friends to be part of it. Once they add themselves to you fans list, this activity will be visible to their friends through the news feed. The main difference betwee
Facebook pages and Facebook profiles is that the former is visible via Internet search engines. Once a member becomes a fan ofyour page, he/she can receive messages from your pages. Use the share option to share your page with other members; this helps in bringing more people to your page.Facebook has a flexible privacy model; you can share your page with only those you know or make it available on the Internet search engines.

If you are a regular user of Facebook, you already understand the importance of connecting with Influencers. For those of you who are new to Facebook, Influencers are people who have the most friends on their list. Before you start connecting with influencers, take time to prepare a list of influencers you want to connect to. The best place to start is with your own friends list. Start conversations with the influencers by introducing yourself and take an extra effort to send personalised messages to each of them. If you do a copy paste job and send it to hundreds of influencers, your account will be marked for spam. Do not ask them to join your fan page immediately. Decide on a date you want to ask the influencers to join your fan page. If you have too man yinfluencers on your list, you can have multiple launch dates.

A Facebook page that is written in accordance with SEO techniques will receive moretraffic from search engines like Google and Bing. Google indexes its results and claimsto have indexed more than 430 million pages in Facebook. Driving traffic to yourwebsite is possible in many ways. Assume that you are a retailer selling wedding gownsand already have a website. First thing to do is to link your website to your Facebookpage/profile. This is a quick way to boost traffic to your page. Another way is toparticipate in discussions and forums and provide your signature with a backlink to yourFacebook page. You can also link your page to relevant blogs. In the above example,linking with pages/blogs that relate to wedding gowns will boost your page ranking; not ifyou link it to blogs or posts that relate to interior decorations.

News feed is a way to promote you on Facebook. It is important that the news feedremains engaging, entertaining and fresh to retain members’ support. You can start anonline interactive magazine on Facebook to engage your members. The content mustbe fresh and you must update it at regular intervals. Your magazine dies if you stoppublishing information. As an example: Assume you are from the fashion industry; youcan share tips about everyday fashion, retro fashion, teen fashion etc. Remember not tofill in all the information in the first issue itself; doing so will leave you with very littleinformation for the succeeding issues. Over advertising is counterproductive to yourbusiness. Insert your business advertisement at a strategic point. People don’t like tosee advertisements all through the magazine. A magazine with quality content is thebest form of advertisement to promote your business.

Facebook Connect is the blue button you see on websites. Using this button you canlog into the website with your Facebook username and password. So, how does thishelp marketers? Facebook Connect provides more visibility to the websites andprovides you an opportunity to connect with your customers, prospective buyers andbrand loyalists. Facebook members can sign into blogs and forums to post commentsand participate in discussions. (It wipes out the painful task of registering with a websiteto engage in a particular activity.) Commenting is the most popular feature of FacebookConnect. You can also share blogs, articles etc by using ‘Share this’ button. You canshare stories too and push it on to your Facebook page. For example if you rate a Spaon Yelp, you can push to our Facebook wall through ‘Facebook Connect’ button.Facebook Connect has other uses such as social filtering, watching friend activity, etc.