How To Use Facebook For Marketing
March 5th, 2010In a survey conducted among undergraduates in the US, Facebook was found to be the second most popular application only after the iPod. Today, Facebook.com is one of the most popular networking sites for over 175 million of the world’s college population, business people and company employees. Therefore, it has emerged as the ultimate marketing tool. Marketing on Facebook has certainly come of age.
Users of Facebook are a part of various networks. They communicate with friends and colleagues, professional acquaintances, customers and partners through messages, videos, photos and activity updates. You can send virtual pokes or virtual gifts to your friends, post messages on a virtual wall and you can even play chess or scrabble over several days asynchronously. Here are some tips to leverage the site’s marketing capabilities.
1. Profile: This is the starting point for your marketing efforts. You must create an online image of yourself that expresses your passion for your brand. Use this opportunity fully to leverage the power of Facebook because the profile page is the most frequently browsed page of your online presence. Create a real life story around your product or service, how you started and how your business has grown and so on.
2. Notes: These are like blogs wherein you can share information about your product features, testimonials of satisfied customers, answers to frequently asked questions and tips on how to use your products for the best results. Ensure that you keep posting information at regular intervals as that will give your brand a dynamic image.
3. Marketplace: You can post classified advertisements for people in your network. There is no charge for this. However, if you want the ads to be seen by people outside your network then there is a small charge of $1 per ad per network. Ensure that you do not spam the system with multiple insertions.
4. Facebook Social Ads: If you have some money to spend, you can pay for user clicks or some specified user action. This is a highly effective way of generating leads for your products since you can target your ads to specific demographics like age range, location, education level, relationship status and workplaces. There is also a real time facility to see the effect of your ads and to tweak your budget accordingly.
5. Polls: You can conduct market research for your target market using this facility on Facebook. You can expect to get a large number of responses within hours, which you can analyze with some rudimentary tools provided by the application.
Apart from these, Facebook offers a host of other tools and applications (like Facebook PPC) for the insightful marketer to leverage for developing his brand and promoting his products.
