Promoting On Facebook |
The strength of your Facebook presence is going to define how effectively you can promote your business, products, events or services to your market. Remember, Facebook is just the tool - you are the marketer who has to get it right.
Social Ads: These are additional paid branding options within Facebook, to allow you to reach a wider network and reinforce your branding message. These advertisements are shown based on your specific demographic and keyword requirements. It is an incredibly cost effective channel for marketing to niche segments based on pay-per-click (or view) modalities. Spots are given based on bids so make sure your bids aren’t too low, or you may risk losing to competitors. Because of its excessively focused placement, it is bound to get targeted traffic to your sites. You can make these ads interesting by adding a picture and tagline that will appeal to your market. The idea would be to get yourself some ad spots before the big market players’ jump in with their endlessly deep pockets.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Networking On Facebook |
Finding friends: Once you have your profile all nicely set up. Look for people that you already know from your past or present life that are on Facebook. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think they fit your market segments - the bigger your network the better it will be. So, get down to some serious people hunting. Remember not to add people that you don’t already know at this stage or they may report you as a spammer. Your Facebook friends list is your golden egg. It should be people who all know you and will endorse what you represent. I make it a policy to engage in some direct communication with everyone on my Facebook friend list whether through wall to wall chats or direct messages. I qualify them and take time to look at their profiles and websites. I also confirm that each of my contacts have taken the time to do the same for me. I make it a habit to post a comment on the wall of any new friends I connect with, to any new fan who joins one of my pages or groups and on the wall of anyone who comments on one of my notes. This simple tactic publishes my interaction with these people onto their profile page walls where thousands of their connections see it. Now, if my comments are alluring enough people will click through to my profile page which becomes a front door into my social network.
Your list of friends in Facebook as opposed to fans in your groups is the equivalent of launching your own company’s promotional campaign while promoting client’s parties. Your client’s parties are promoted using pages and groups; whereas your own company’s annual Christmas party guest-list should be on your friend’s profile. It’s where you would invite your biggest clients, your friends and supporters. It’s the one party of the year where your company’s endeavours are the focus for all attendees. It’s full of your evangelists, so the best place on earth to pull in big client prospects to mix with (to get a direct feel on your business ethics) are those who know you best. A lot of people use the friends function in Facebook as a numbers game that gives them bragging rights. My policy is that of quality not quantity on this one. Slow down and take time to build a list of your best advocates here. Everyone on your friends list should listen to you when you have something to say. If they don’t, what’s the point of listing them as friends?…
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Facebook Groups |
Groups, as the name implies, adds the community aspect to Facebook. While Facebook Pages may be considered somewhat static forms of promotion, ‘Groups’ are interactive. Facebook Groups offer community based collaboration around a specific topic. The interesting thing is that you are allowed to invite 100 friends from your address book at a time. It allows for easy streaming of updates through messages to group fans. Facebook will not allow you to mass message everyone in your friends list but they will allow you to send the same message to all of the fans in your group.
One thing’s for sure, the people managing Facebook are serious about keeping it as spam free as possible. If you try to send the same message to more than 20 friends (contacts), you get a warning message of getting banned because of possible spamming. Yes there are ways in which you can work around this: You can stream updates and content to group fans as often as you want. Groups are capped at 5000 fans per group. By the way, fans are individuals who want you to update them and send them information regularly; otherwise they have an option to leave your group.
When you join a group, you immediately get messages from the Group Administrators. You can reply to them to get the conversations started. I recently found out that Facebook has no restrictions on sending the same message to over 20 people if you are replying to them. However if I join 200 groups (which is the max limit of groups I can join on Facebook) I will inevitably be sent 200 marketing messages every week from the group administrators, which allows me the opportunity to respond with the same message an unlimited number of times. The rule of thumb is not to spam people but get multiple conversations started by joining niche groups. I sent reply messages to the administrators of 200 night club promotion groups who were all asking me to attend their nights. In my reply I asked if I could buy a ticket to their events online. Nine out of ten responded with a “NO” which spun the conversation in the direction of online ticketing solutions. Now, my Events Listed application happens to facilitate this solution but I only pointed this out to people who were interested in finding a solution.
We’ve built a Facebook Group for “Social Traffic” as a way to engage as many people as possible, all the while building a culture around the group. As an example, all group members believe in building fewer quality relationships rather than populating lists with random followers. All members also know that the best way to be heard is to listen.
Facebook has a policy that ensures that only real people have accounts. Naturally, it becomes a social etiquette not to offend your contacts in any way. The relationship dynamic of having ‘friends’’, effectively retains the sanctity of friendship in the Group’s inner circle as something with a high perceived value to members. I think all the press Facebook gets for shutting down accounts of people who have multiple identities or who cannot prove they are a real person behind the account as brilliant. It’s the same as how everyone wants to get into those nightclubs that have beautiful, successful and sophisticated people in it. Their door-policies protect your experience of visiting the night club. A successful professional doesn’t want to spend $100 on a night out in a club to be surrounded by road-workers. They want to know their effort and expense will ensure the experience is what they visualized before committing to it and that someone they trust is underwriting it.
As a user, the stringent policies of Facebook make me feel that my experience of using it (as opposed to other platforms, like MySpace) is going to be a better one. It’s funny how policies like these affect their growth rate. A few years ago, MySpace was leading this domain, whereas Facebook was just a little brother to it. Today, Facebook has grown tremendously and flown past MySpace and many other social networks. This is because they take extra measures to safeguard their user’s privacy and experience. The way that companies like Facebook and Google conduct their businesses draws light on the future of online business. They are my mentors and teachers. I study their strategies and policies every day to stay on the cutting edge. Watching how the “best” get to that level helps in predicting what is to come. I would encourage you to always be aware of everything that is happening around you in the online world.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Facebook Pages |
Next off, once you have your Facebook profile all set up, you can build as many separate pages as you want for your businesses, products, events or launches. You can customize and design your pages around your business and position yourself as an expert in each. These pages are meant for businesses, so they have ‘fans’ instead of ‘friends’ in them.
Facebook pages are an incredibly powerful tool for marketing. They’re free platforms and spaces for your business right in the middle of your targeted customers. You need to build a fan base around the page content. Then you need to stream content into the page as frequently as possible, relevant to the page itself as this content is syndicated through all the fans of the pages mini news-feed. If you have 100 fans to the page and you post a picture every day about an event along with a mini post then these 100 fans will see it in their mini-feed.
To build a Facebook page, go through the simple process of creating a new page (facebook.com/business). Your Facebook pages are publicly visible and searchable. You can make as many Facebook pages as you want. Keep in mind that pages have to be for real entities. You can also build one page per event. You can go through their rules in the page setup wizard so that the event itself can be shown as a business. You can make your pages interesting by adding pictures, applications, posts and links (to your sites). Whenever you change something on your page, an update is sent to all of the fans of the page in their news feeds. Here’s a screenshot of a Facebook page that we have setup as a brochure advertisement for “Social Traffic”.
When you have your basic page set up, allow the community to build around it. You have to attract people to join in, as they won’t just accidentally fall on the page. A page is like a particular sponsor’s tent within a festival. You need to attract people to the tent and keep them entertained and interested in that particular tent so they remember it. Often times they will tell others about it and even leave their contact details as an invitation to invite them into a conversation. In a Facebook Page this would mean that they have become a ‘fan’. It’s these invitations that are the foundation of our businesses and we will discuss what to do with them a little later in the book. Once a person becomes a fan he/she can upload photos, write on the wall and talk to other fans. The idea is to make them feel like it’s their own space. When other people (non-fans) see the activity, they are incentivized to join as well. This is how you get more people to the sponsor’s tent. Those who have visited the tent may invariably spend the rest of the day walking throughout the party telling others that that particular tent is a must to visit. The only difference with social media is that you don’t need a festival or a sponsor’s tent to be doing this 24/7/365; and the audience is infinite.
Make everything an experience. Make the pages interesting and interactive so that they appeal to your targeted audiences and empower them. For example, if you’re launching an event, make an event page and get the prospects to contribute to the event setup or stage design. You have to give people a reason for engaging with the community that you are building around any object.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Facebook.com is a perfect place for connecting with your existing clients, attracting new businesses or for networking with other professionals in your fields of interest. Facebook provides an environment which is conducive to building these relationships which is why they recently hit the 100 million users mark.
At first I thought the Facebook hype and romance would fade away as newer and better social applications kept trotting along - until I used it myself. For businesses, Facebook has a lot of revenue potential as it is a wealth of deep relationship-based consumer data. Having said that, it’s important to note that you can’t just jump into the bandwagon and start marketing there – it has to be a gradual process.
Your first step to creating a presence is your ‘Facebook Profile’ - this is a personal profile of you, not your business. You need to add a personal element to your business if you want room in these social networking sites. This personal touch makes your business seem more human, and consequently more likable. So, in Facebook, your personal profile should be about you - the image that you want to share with your networks. Eventually, when people start following you, they will also become interested in your business. But initially, make sure you get your personal profile right.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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