Wednesday 10 April 2013

Facebook Marketing: Social Media Darling Or Devil?


Facebook Marketing: Social Media Darling Or Devil?

You’ve probably noticed that almost every business has a Facebook page nowadays. If yours doesn’t, you’re missing out! Smart business owners know that they can reach millions of people via Facebook that you would never even meet otherwise. Join the Internet revolution with these tips about how to market your business on Facebook.
Invite people to like and share your page as much as possible, with an incentive. For example, if someone shares a page and gets at least 50 “likes” on that share, offer them a $10 gift card. Getting traffic to your site is imperative for the impact on your business.
Visit the Facebook pages of your competitors. You should pay attention to the updates they share and how many subscribers comment on their updates. Keep in mind that Facebook users will not subscribe to more than one page on a certain topic. Look for mistakes your competitors make so you can develop a better campaign.

Facebook Marketing: Social Media Darling Or Devil?

Use Facebook apps to promote your products, services or contests. You can create fun and interactive games which are used to enter a sweepstakes, or an app which highlights a new item from your inventory every week. If it also prompts people to answer a question, like “which is your favourite feature of this item?”, you’ll build communication, too.
Use Facebook throughout the day and night. Facebook isn’t something that clocks out at 5:00pm. If you are serious about your Facebook marketing, you need to think about how you can engage your fans even during your typical off-hours. If you don’t, it’ll be hard to keep them interested in you for a prolonged period.
It is truly a myth that every business HAS to be on Facebook. The cost of the time taken to plan your campaigns, maintain your page, communicate with fans, and advertise can become a massive burden on a small business owner. Consider carefully if the costs will be outweighed by the profit increases.
Visitors should be able to identify the theme of your Facebook page right away. Choose a profile picture and a cover page related to your theme and write a short but efficient description of your brand on your profile page. This is very important if your brand is not recognizable yet.
Link your Facebook page with your web site so it’s more easily accessed from a search engine. Making sure that one serves as a more official site and the other gives more frequent updates, specials or other interesting information can spark interest and remain useful. Increasing your accessibility is key in getting more customers.
If you are going to post coupons and deals on your Facebook page, make sure that they are worth something valuable. Nobody wants to be constantly bombarded with messages offering five dollars off, especially if the median price of items you have for sale is more than one hundred dollars.
Even though you have started a Facebook page to increase business, keep sales related postings to a minimum. The best thing to do is to work on engaging the reader and showing them the benefits of doing business. Sprinkling coupons and deals between these type of postings will be more effective than swamping people with sales posts.
Change the tab order on your Facebook business page. The tabs will be in vertical order on the left of the page to start with. Under your list of tabs is the “Edit” option. Use this to customize the order of the tabs outside of the Info and Wall tabs. This can help you create a better hierarchy of which tabs should be near the top or the bottom in order to have some stand out more than others.
Facebook Places are a fun way to engage your customers. Create a page for your business and then reward your customers for checking in with Check In Deals. For example, a check-in could get them 10% off their purchase, or a coupon for a free additional item. You can even donate to charity on their behalf!
Don’t relay too much on automation. It can be very tempting to automate your Facebook posting. More posts are better, right? That’s not always the case. People can sense an automated post, especially if all you post are links to stories from around the web. You won’t be building any sort of engagement between your audience and your brand.
Use a lot of bold colours on your Facebook marketing page. The key is to grab the attention of anyone that happens upon your page without being so bold that you put them off. It is best to stay away from hot colours  however, as that can be very difficult to view on a computer.
Be careful of any images you post as ads, as only 20% of the image can be actual text. If you end up submitting an image which has more than 20% text, it will be rejected and you’ve wasted your time. Be creative and create an image which captures your audience’s attention.
Respond to comments or questions as soon as possible. With technology today, people like speed. The quicker you can be about responding to the questions and comments that your audience has, the better. This will show them that you really do care about them as customers and value them.
While you want to advertise your products, this should not be the only content that is present on your Facebook page. You should share any information that you feel is relevant to your business. If people think that making money is your only goal, they will be hesitant to work with you.
Those who use Facebook as a marketing tool need to make sure there are ways to interact with potential consumers. By design, Facebook is a social network. Most people use Facebook to communicate and share with others, so make sure that you are providing a means for you to have two-way conversation with others. Brainstorm about your brand’s specific aspects which are inherently social. If you create engaging content around these aspects, people will want to share it with their friends.
When opportunity knocks in marketing, you open the door. Get your company’s Facebook profile up and running soon and see what it can do for the bottom line. Given the small amount of resources required to get a Facebook campaign going, it’s foolish not to capitalize on this fast-paced and far reaching marketing medium.

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