Today, I thought I’d give you local business owners a series of tips on how to handle this behemoth known as Facebook. If you are a local business owner then before you ask, yes Facebook marketing matters to you too!
I am going to save the discussion of Facebook ads for a future post. But you should know that Facebook ads could be one of the most targeted and profitable ways to market on Facebook.
Today, however, let’s explore how to use Facebook in a lot of other ways (i.e. FREE) to market your products and websites.
The starting point for your presence on Facebook is your profile page.
Your profile page is basically a landing page that you design in order to convert your friends to engage with certain parts of your identity.
If you want to use this free Facebook marketing strategy, the secret is to expand your network as much as possible. The way to do this is to expand! Start a group and you create a central place for customers, partners, and friends to participate in conversations around your brand. Facebook groups come with boards for posting discussion topics, photos, videos, and links right out of the box. And the best part about Groups is you can create as many as you like for free.
While Groups do offer a reasonably robust feature set with no setup, you’re not able to extend their functionality with Facebook applications. In order to use those, you will need to get a Facebook Fan Page.
Fan Pages were launched by Facebook in November 2007 as a way for businesses of many types to easily establish a brand presence on Facebook. Fan Pages are more customizable than groups. You can add HTML, Flash, or even Facebook applications to your pages to extend their functionality. Fan Pages are a good option for small or local businesses that want to establish a presence on Facebook. Like groups, they’re another free and easy way to do viral marketing.
You can also join network marketing group, send out several comments, write notes, add friends, add events, join events, wall post on Groups, wall post on Friends Walls, post videos in Groups, cross pollinate with other Group Owners, add many photos, make sure all your privacy settings are OFF.
Never forget that Facebook is a society so don’t try to be a seller, try to solve others problems. Community is about communication, and that might be the best advertising you could hope for.
Brands are already networking and engaging with consumers via Facebook for leverage, a strengthening and generating a better understanding of the brand itself and customer relationships with it, and for participation and valuable feedback.
Don’t underestimated the power of this free Facebook marketing tool, you can connect with people around the world so easily.
Till next time,
-Jason
Your Local Internet Marketing Consultant
