Even if you live in an underground lair, you have at least heard of Facebook. Not only are your favorite sports team and primetime show asking for a fan request, but so are your local grocer, your dentist and your financial advisor. Whereas Facebook began as a way to connect students, Facebook is now literally connecting the world, with no industry stone left unturned.
Facebook is not for young college students anymore as that signature blue box now shines light upon the faces of a much wider audience. Today, Facebook is a powerful presence that provides marketing opportunities galore. As the average age of the Facebook community continues to rise, so do the number of companies, both B2C and B2B, making Facebook an integral and newer element of their marketing plan.
And it is costing them, essentially nothing. With the exception of pay-per-click and pay-per-impression ads, Facebook is friendly to sales and marketing budgets and requires only time, and perhaps a little bit of creativity and finesse.
So how do you cater for a party of 250 million Facebook users? You don’t. Instead, be smart in how you join the world of Facebook and make the right connections, seek out your appropriate audiences, and mingle. Challenge. Flirt. Push. Pull. And join the conversation that may now be going on without you.
First, get started and create a Facebook Page. It’s so easy a caveman can do it.
Your page will be the home base of your Facebook marketing presence. Through it, Facebook users can become your fan. When they do, your name and logo will appear on their profile page and you will be in their feed, visible to everyone in their networks. You will be viral, in a good way. Don’t fight it.
Then, explore other marketing uses of Facebook:
- Promote your events and occasions. Facebook evites are a cake walk. If you are a law firm, invite young law talent to your recruitment event…if you are a restaurant, promote your happy hour specials.
- Engage your audience with contests and polls. Let your audiences interact with you. Ask them questions, and listen to their responses. Build a game for them to play with you online. If they feel you are allowing them to impact your decisions as a company or organization, they will continue to share how they feel with you.
- Create Discussion Boards to solicit user feedback and generate brainstorms.
- Keep it exciting and new. Make sure your Facebook page is equipped with fresh photos, videos and updates. Would you go to CNN.com or STLToday.com if the information never changed?
- Sync up your Twitter updates with your Facebook account. Take advantage of one data entry point so you still have time to stop and smell the flowers from time to time. Need to learn more about Twitter?… read our article.
- Integrate Facebook with your web site. Inspire your existing site visitors to become a fan of your organization on Facebook. Perhaps let them see a different side or you, or simply use Facebook to push out information that they would otherwise have to seek out themselves on your site. Add Facebook Share links on your site as well to help your fans talk to their friends about you.
- Implement the Fan Box widget on your website to gain more fans and share your Facebook updates. This implementation requires pasting only 4 lines of code.
- Or add a Comment Box to your site, allowing Facebook users on your site to comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. Kick up your feet and let your fans promote you.
- Try out paid social ads. Target your ads to your audience. Determine age, gender, geographic, interests, marital status, etc. Cast your net as small, or as big as you would like and pay only for performance.
- Capture your vanity URL. Make your Facebook page easily accessible: http://facebook.com/yourcompanynamehere.
- Set up Facebook Insights to track your fans and their activity on your page. Understand who is in your Facebook network and how often they are checking out your page. Explore metrics of gender & age, page views, weekly trending, etc.
- And be sure to talk. That’s right, get out there. Converse. Give them something to talk about. Be clever. Be personable. Be professional. Spell everything right.
- Finally, reap search engine optimization (SEO) benefits. Facebook pages have proven to rank very highly in Google search results, so enjoy the boost of your SEO rankings.
With that, you are off! See you on Facebook. (Visit Paradigm’s fan page on Facebook!)
