How to use Facebook for Business and Marketing

Succeeding in Five Crucial Areas

Building a profitable and sustainable business is possible with social media marketing. You just have to be aware of how to implement the best practices for each crucial area of your business. This section I will reveal to you the most practical and most effective practices for each crucial area.

Product Creation

Product creation can be extremely tricky and risky if you have no idea what your market wants. You can end up spending a lot of money or time in developing products that no one wants to buy. Take your time, research see what others are doing, make a plan and then implement.

You can eliminate this risk by working closely with your niche/market through Facebook marketing. Here are some ways that you can use Facebook to help your product creation efforts:

•  Launch a campaign to gather feedback from your market. You can have a general idea for a product and then ask people what they want to see in the product.

For example, if you’re selling a new book for a specific niche like beekeeping, you can ask beekeeping enthusiasts what they want to see in a new, up-to-date beekeeping guide.

You can convince people to respond to your new campaign by offering something of value. Many businesses run contests to encourage people to join the conversation on Facebook. Once you have enough feedback from your market, you can tighten loose ends by having your fans vote for the features or product characteristics that they like the best.

•  Create awareness about your campaign. Again, never underestimate the power of advertising on a huge social network like Facebook.

Don’t forget to send an email blast to your email list (if you have one) and promote your new Facebook campaign offline as well. The more people that you can drive to your event or campaign, the better. The higher the number of participants, the better the chances of getting quality feedback that will help your product creation efforts.

•  Be active! Once you’ve launched your campaign, stay on your toes. The worst thing you can do to a campaign of this nature is to ‘leave the office.’ Just because Facebook pages will automatically accept comments and other input doesn’t mean that your work is done.

All forms of social media marketing require regular monitoring. If you want your efforts to succeed, you have to watch how your campaign develops throughout the days, weeks, or even months (if it was geared to run for months).

Increasing Awareness

Increasing awareness is not limited to your Facebook page in general. You can generate attention for a ton of other things such as actual promotional events, contests, etc.

•  Effective Facebook ads. Read just a little bit about copywriting before designing your Facebook ads. Trust me – the time you spend reading about this form of writing will pay off almost immediately. In the world of advertising, there are only two kinds of ads: ads that generate interest and ads that people absolutely dislike.

Of course, we want our ads to be liked, so you have to write effective ads before launching your Facebook ads. Like other text-and-image based ads, Facebook ads are limited. Don’t worry.

Instead of making a grand gesture with your ads, focus on the top features of what you’re trying to promote and invite people to take a look (or at least, click the “Like” button).

•  Embedded calls to action. When you ask someone to click on a link or answer an online poll, that’s a “call to action.” The call to action is the last thing that people read when they see ads. But that doesn’t mean that you can only place calls to action on Facebook ads.

Remember: Once people start clicking the “Like” button on your Facebook page, your list of fans will start grow. Fans will see your Wall posts on their news feeds and voila: you can place calls to action for nearly anything. You can invite your fans to an event, inform them of a new product offering, and so on.

Encouraging Preference Over Other Brands

When people start talking about your product or service, that means you were able to place a firm anchor on your market’s imagination. You can further boost preference for your product or service by following these steps:

•  Feedback is number 1. Congratulations, people like your product! But that’s not the end of the journey. You have to find out why people like your product so much.Is it the quality? Is your product unique? Ask your fans nicely and they’ll respond. Don’t forget to use the Questions feature on your Facebook page; then use the Facebook Page Insights tool to find out more about your target audiences.

•  Current perceptions vs. ideal perception. When a new brand is introduced to a market, people imagine the brand to have certain characteristics. These perceptions are called current perceptions and may not be completely aligned with what you had in mind in the first place.

If you think the current perception is too far off the mark, then you must define the various differentiation points between the current perception of your brand (what people think about your brand now) and the ideal perception (the kind of perception and brand awareness that is in line with your marketing goals).

Again, getting feedback is the most effective way of getting this vital piece of information.

If you adjust a campaign without first knowing what your market is actually thinking about your brand, then your market might not respond at all to the change. If you want guaranteed results from your campaigns, the first step is to dig deep into the mindset of your market.

•  Facebook integration. When someone approaches me about Facebook marketing, I always tell the person that Facebook should not be treated as a separate marketing method, especially when online marketing is used. Facebook is not just a website; it’s an entire social experience.

You wouldn’t want to separate this particular chunk of your marketing efforts from all the other marketing efforts you have in motion, would you?

So whether you have one website or ten or even a hundred, make sure that you integrate your Facebook campaign with all of your relevant websites. Engaging content that is tailor-fit for your market should be provided regularly, too.

Boosting Buyer Traffic

If there is no traffic to your Facebook page (and all your other websites), you won’t generate any profit from your online marketing.

Some people spend so much time designing and beautifying their websites that they forget the main goal of every marketing effort: sales. On the World Wide Web, the twin sister of sales is traffic. Neither will exist without the other. To keep traffic flowing to your Facebook page, follow these tips:

•  Goals, goals, goals. Inviting people to join a Facebook Page or Facebook Group is one thing. But what about sales? You need to generate profit from all your hard work. And to generate profit, you need sales – lots of sales.

An actual sale is the end-point; in order to arrive at this end-point, you need specific goals. If you are just starting out with online marketing, start small. Ask yourself: What do you want to sell to your fans, and how do you intend to promote that product or service?

Think of different ways to promote a single product and test your theories. Not all Facebook Events and promotional activities will draw enough attention. Not every campaign is a hundred percent successful. But that is in itself not a bad thing!

Because once fans ignore a particular campaign you gain instant insight about your market.

Of course, you won’t repeat a bad campaign ever again. Instead, you’ll be able to learn from what your market does not like so you can come up with a new promotional campaign that they will like and respond to.

•  Highlight your promotion. Don’t be content with just posting information about a promotional event on your Wall. Instead, create an exclusive tab on your Facebook page about your event.

If you have a contest and a promotional campaign running at the same time, make two separate tabs. That way people will feel they have stumbled upon something very important and you can generate excitement and social stories by jazzing up these exclusive information tabs.

• Maximize the P.O.P. At the point of purchase (P.O.P.), many marketers think they’ve finally succeeded – and yes, who wouldn’t want to see those sales rolling in? But did you know that you can use the point of purchase to further advertise your product or service?

By using the Deals feature on Facebook, Facebook users who click on your Deal will automatically be able to publish on their Walls what they have purchased from you. Continuous sharing is important. So don’t forget to include a “Share on Facebook” link on your product pages so that people can log on to Facebook and post to their walls what they have found on your store.

You can also use Facebook Ads to drive people directly to your landing page or buying page. But you have to inform your readers/fans that when they click on your ad, the link will take them to a website that is not part of the Facebook social network.

Don’t worry! People love transparency and they appreciate it if you don’t try to trick them into thinking that your store is still part of Facebook. Tech-savvy customers can smell a scam a mile away and Facebook ads that are not transparent may be completely ignored by this growing group of Facebook users.

Helping Build Brand Loyalty

Social networks like Facebook are essentially places to establish personal relationships. In Facebook marketing, we take this concept and modify it to fit our needs as business people. So how do we combine marketing with social media in this respect?

The answer has been repeated throughout this book: we need to establish a relationship with our customers.

When a person finds your page — either through a manual search or by clicking on a link posted by a friend — and clicks “Like” on your Facebook page, that means that on a very basic level, that person already wants to connect and have a relationship with what your Facebook page represents: your business.

And what does a relationship entail? You guessed it: communication. Social media without communication is not social media. It’s just empty space. The steps below will help you establish a better connection with your fans.

•  Rinse and repeat. A single post about ‘being on Facebook’ will not be enough to gain the attention of the majority of people. That’s why you must not stop after your initial efforts in inviting fans to your Facebook Page. Rinse and repeat. Never tire of the process, because in the end, it will all pay off.

Use regular email blasts to inform non-fans of the various events on your Facebook page and always tell people about your page.

Make your Facebook Page the center of your marketing campaign and you will gain a lot more insight about your market. When people finally arrive on your Facebook page, don’t forget about frequent updates and relevant content.

•  Become a part of your fans’ lives. This may sound difficult to achieve (well, at least at first), but the most successful social media marketers are able to draw thousands of “Likes” and hundreds of responses with a single post.

Take the popular television show Glee for example. Glee is about a high school glee club that features a very heterogeneous mix of characters. When Glee made its appearance on Facebook, fans literally flocked to ‘join the conversation’. As of this writing, the Glee Facebook Page has thirteen million fans and draws a minimum of five thousand “Likes” with each post.

Your business may not be as big as this television show, but we can certainly learn things from the guys behind the Glee Facebook page.

The Glee Facebook team frequently updates their page and posts a lot of fresh material on a regular basis. Apart from news items, the Glee Facebook Page also brings the fans closer to the cast by providing exclusive photos, videos, interviews, etc.

•  Providing value is essential. People like being rewarded for their efforts, even if it’s just clicking on a “Like” button. So I’m going to repeat what I said earlier about providing value: if you want your fans to respond, you have to give them an incentive to do so. Incentives don’t have to be grand or expensive at all.

For example, you can offer a digital product (i.e. an MP3) if they answer a poll or survey. It’s that easy!

Even if the reward is small, people still like the idea of getting a genuine reward for something that they did for a business. People will think it’s a fair deal, and consequently, they’ll also think that you run a great business because you treat your customers so well.

The Three-Step Facebook Page Strategy

Social media is always about the continuing dialog. Everything that we’ve just discussed can be summed up in a three-step process:

1. Create
2. Communicate
3. Intensify

Step 1: Create

You have to create a strong presence on the social network with a Facebook Page. Facebook pages allow you to create an online presence and a strong brand – not just a static brand that people cannot engage with socially. A Facebook page allows people to express their interests, likes, and dislikes.

After creating your online presence, you have to increase the relevance and interactive nature of your Facebook page by using Facebook applications and relevant third-party plug-ins that are fully compatible with the social network. Everything that you put on your page must be completely relevant and should be in line with short-term and long-term business goals.

Step 2: Communicate

The next step is to communicate with potential fans. The easiest way to do this is by sharing your Facebook page with existing contacts. Using the Facebook Ads service is another way to reach your target market faster. People can click “Like” on your ad if they genuinely find the topic and content of your ad interesting.

If not, they will most likely choose to ignore or even close your ad. When a business owner decides to engage customers or the market in a genuine dialog, he or she will gain a goldmine of insight that would have otherwise been unavailable.

Nothing is more valuable than knowing what your own market likes or dislikes. This way, you can tailor your business to satisfy the desires and needs of your market. You won’t be working in the dark, at all!

Step 3: Intensify

Intensification occurs when a Facebook page begins to generate social stories which are then shared by fans. The goal of intensification is to encourage other people to take action.

For example: if your business focuses on selling ice cream, the goal of intensification is for as many targeted Facebook members to take notice of your Facebook Page and eventually, buy your brand of ice cream.

Again, using advertising services like Facebook Ads will help spread the word about your Facebook page more easily.

If you don’t have a budget yet for a long-term advertising campaign using Facebook Ads, you can still spread the word about your Facebook page by manually inviting people to “Like” your page.

This requires hard work on your part, but the potential returns for your effort are obviously huge. You will be able to build brand awareness and at the same time, create a community that will market your brand for you. And let’s not forget the much needed sales boost, too.

Boosting Sales Using Facebook

Most of the people who are using Facebook aren’t generally interested in buying something outright while logged on to the social network.

While it’s true that doing a hard sell will most likely produce a backlash on your part as the business owner, creating an extension of your online store on Facebook is a completely different proposition entirely.

Boosting sales on a social network requires subtlety and a genuine desire to connect to customers and potential fans. That’s why a hard sell won’t work. If you just post “Buy This!” and “Buy That!” on your Facebook page, people won’t respond to you. They will most likely ignore you.

On the other hand, if you launch a great campaign that engages people in a dialog (genuine Facebook marketing), you can convince people to directly buy from your Facebook page.

Creating a secure buying environment on a Facebook page may require a little technical tweaking, but it is being done. The trick is to have an online store application installed on your Facebook page so that people can click on a tab and buy with their credit card or PayPal account.

People want secure transactions so you have to make sure that their credit card information is secure when they do decide to buy or order something from your Facebook page/online store.

Now you are by no means limited to Facebook ads when you want to directly advertise your product or service.

Once you’ve established a strong base camp on Facebook, you can begin using different advertising methods to encourage your fans to participate, and ultimately, to buy from you. One of the easiest ways to get people to try a product or service is by launching a viral video.

Viral videos rarely last more than a minute or two. Some viral videos are only twenty or thirty seconds in length. A viral video is usually comedic or shocking in nature. The only goal of a viral video is to get people to visit a link or try a product or service.

If you cannot get a person’s attention in the first few seconds of a viral video, then the viral video is not effective.

A viral video has to be extremely memorable and unique so even if a person doesn’t click right away, he or she will remember your brand or product and may visit your website or Facebook page in the future.

You can also try the Facebook Marketplace to establish a direct connection with interested buyers of specific merchandise. Visit the Facebook Marketplace at http://apps.facebook.com/marketplace/. You will need a valid Facebook account to access this application on Facebook.

Another way to generate social interest in your business is by using the feature called Facebook Events. Facebook Events is a great way to notify people of upcoming events and to get people to respond automatically to an event invitation.

People invited to a Facebook Event can click on “Yes”, “No” and “Maybe” when the notification appears on their Facebook profile. You can continually tweak the contents of your Events page to make the event more attractive to your intended audience.

The Community Around Your Business

Traditional businesses rarely care about consumers. That was the mindset forty or fifty years ago. Big corporations created products and released new products without even knowing what the market wanted. That’s also the reason why many products lasted only a year or two in the market.

Businesses just didn’t know how to listen to their consumers. Traditional businesses tend to rely on antiquated methods of product creation and marketing. Some traditionalists still think that if there is a potential market for a product or service, people would come in droves to buy something.

Fortunately, things have changed for the better in the age of Facebook marketing and social media. Are customers smarter?

Of course they are! People are now more discerning (and also warier) of new brands. That’s why you have to show people that your product or service is trustworthy.

It’s hard to make a lasting impression if you don’t engage your market in an ongoing dialog. If you don’t initiate and continue the conversation or dialog with your existing customers and future customers, your business won’t thrive within the social network.

In addition to your main Facebook page, you can also start a Facebook Group that revolves around your brand or even a general topic that is intimately associated with your brand.

Businesses can also create Facebook Groups that support popular causes. Disease awareness and other causes are a good start; just make sure that you genuinely support your cause.

Larger businesses can host cause-driven events; people can be notified of these events via Facebook. However, before you can notify anybody, you need to attract a large fan base.

Once you have an active Facebook Group, don’t miss the opportunity to lead active discussions with your group. You can hire an expert discussant or you can lead the discussions yourself.

Active discussions can be carried out once or twice a month, depending on your business’ needs. If you are planning a major online launch and you need information about what your market wants to see in a new product, you can ask for feedback using your Facebook Page or Facebook Group.

Some of you may have never tried online marketing, much less Facebook marketing. Don’t worry! Offline marketing and online marketing need not be separated. If you have a brick-and-mortar business already, all you need to do is to inform people that you already have a Facebook Page or Facebook Group.

It can be as simple as putting up posters about your Facebook presence in your business establishment. You can also give away simple items like small bookmarks to encourage people to visit your Facebook Page.

Remember: if you do it correctly, Facebook marketing can put your business on the radar again. You can outdo your competition, because you have a virtually unlimited access to real consumers on the Web. And best of all – you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to do this!

Strategic Tips for Best Status Updates On Facebook

1. People love Facebook pages that have fresh, engaging content. You may have heard of the old Internet marketing adage “Content is King.” Well, it still is.

But let’s modify this adage a little bit: “Content is King, but Distribution is Queen.” Good content that is not distributed to the right market is a lost cause. Bad content that is distributed to a target niche is also a lost cause. So post regular status updates, but be sure to make your posts worthy of your fans’ reading time.

2. Relevance is also a key component if you want your Facebook fans to respond and interact with you. Stay within topic and ask only relevant questions. Your fans will respond if they deem your questions relevant and sensible. Why wouldn’t they?

3. Forthrightness is valued when it comes to business presences on Facebook. For example, let’s say a business sells cupcakes from a roaming truck/food store.

Then a Facebook fan posts a complaint: “I don’t like your new cherry flavored cupcake! It tastes horrible!” In this situation, many business owners would just scowl at the ‘erring’ fan and delete the post.

Don’t be like this. If someone comes up to you with a personal opinion, be forthright and don’t ignore the issue. If people are complaining constantly about your product or several of your products, don’t view the complaints as an attack to your brand.

Instead, view everything as a learning experience. Answer questions and complaints respectfully and frankly, and if you can improve your product or service, inform your fans.

If you ignore your fans or respond rudely to their complaints, your other fans might not like your treatment of your customers. This is bad press and no one wants bad press – especially on an online platform where information can be passed on to hundreds or thousands of other people in a blink of an eye.

4. Never leave your Facebook fans in the dark. If you want to inform them about a significant development in your business, be prepared to provide additional information and resources.

If you want to share relevant news items, include a link to the main source of the news item. Posting links is also an effective way of drawing attention to your posts. (Remember, you still have to compete with other items on your fans’ ever-changing news feed.)

5. According to recent studies, the shorter the link, the more likely people are to click. And when you want to share something with your fans, nothing matters more than the click. Online services like TinyURL can help cut the length of those gargantuan links. Try this service today by visiting http://tinyurl.com/. Have fun making those gargantuan links Facebook-worthy!

6. Your Facebook page is not a personal Facebook profile. If you want to share an album documenting your trip to Disneyland, do that elsewhere. Consumers are not interested in the personal lives of the people behind businesses.

If you own a Facebook business page and continue to share irrelevant material with your fans, people will view your page as a distraction and may cease being fans.

7. Although some people have successfully used Facebook pages to directly sell products to people, the majority of people who become fans of pages generally do not expect sales offers.

Hard selling products or services on your Facebook page may result in people leaving your camp. So keep your promotions low-key and friendly. If you want to do a hard sell, direct people to your website instead.

Market research is a valuable planning tool for businesses of all sizes and types. What’s more, you don’t need a huge budget to gather data about your customers’ perceptions and preferences and how they make buying decisions. Market research can also help you with decisions about where to direct advertising and marketing resources. All it takes is a willingness to learn and some careful planning. In just 60 seconds I will show you how to develop a market market research strategy for your small business.

What Information You Need To Know And Why

What information about your current or potential customers will help you serve them better? Demographic data and travel patterns can help you determine the feasibility of opening a new location, while knowledge about their daily schedules can help you set more convenient hours of operation.

See What’s Already Been Discovered

There is probably more published information available about your type of business and target market than you realize. Among the best sources are the U.S. Census Bureau, national and regional business publications, trade organizations and your local chamber of commerce.

Build On What You’re Doing

It’s easy to make market research a part of your day-to-day activities. Retailers can use sales receipts, delivery orders and charge slips to identify where customers live, or monitor inventory trends to gauge the popularity of certain product lines. Tracking orders of daily specials helps restaurant owners determine which dishes are most popular on a weekly or seasonal basis.

Talk To Your Customers

As a small business owner, you’re face-to-face with your customers, even in a virtual world. Your market research can be as informal as observing customers in the store, as they interact on your website, via email, online forums, or by doing a survey and as elaborate as
conducting a full-scale research program with focus groups and computer-generated maps.

Main Benefits of Facebook Marketing for Business

When Facebook first came online in 2004, no one really envisioned an online world that would be permeated by its various technologies.

Today, no one can even think of the quintessential online experience without using Facebook. It has become that popular. Small, medium, and large businesses now use Facebook to increase brand awareness, which will gradually develop brand loyalty.

Multinational corporations typically use Facebook to strengthen brand loyalty. Up-and-coming brands, on the other hand, work hard to increase word-of-mouth interest. If you want one word to describe what Facebook marketing is all about, think viral.

When something goes viral, it spreads unabated like wildfire and people start talking about the hottest thing on the web right now.

Granted, not every business can create a viral hit overnight, but it’s always worth trying – and when you do succeed in creating something buzz worthy, the best platform on which to share your viral gem is Facebook – with your fans and soon-to-be fans.

When a viral hit is introduced on a Facebook page, fans will most likely generate some buzz by writing about the viral hit on their own Facebook walls.

When individual networks of personal contacts read about the viral hit and Like it, the process is repeated. It’s not uncommon for just one viral hit to be viewed and talked about millions of times in just a matter of days.

You don’t have to depend on the Facebook platform at all when creating your viral hit. You just have to share the viral hit on this social network. It can be a video on YouTube or a set of awesome photos on Flickr.

If you have a new game coming out and you want to generate enough buzz to sell on the launch day, why not create a test version and give it away on Facebook? There are hundreds of ways to create a hit.

Here’s another reason to love Facebook marketing: Facebook pages are automatically indexed by Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.

If a Facebook page is teeming with activity and has a steadily growing fan base, search engines also note this constant buzz of activity. Eventually, the activity on your Facebook page will affect the significance and ranking of your main website (since your page links to your main website).

Since Facebook has a large membership base, businesses are also finding it easier to recruit people directly from their Facebook pages.

Although other services like LinkedIn are better equipped for this type of activity, it hasn’t stopped companies from advertising on their Facebook pages and attracting the right professionals. Some companies are even using Facebook to gather vital feedback from their consumers before launching a new product.

As you can see from these benefits, Facebook marketing actually encompasses a lot of activities. You can achieve almost anything — whether you’re selling something, strengthening an existing brand, or conducting research before product development. Facebook marketing offers a venue where interaction with the market is easy and stress-free.