Marketing Opportunities on Facebook

Facebook gives a number of marketing opportunities for businesses, and in this blog we’ll highlight what those opportunities are and give you some ideas to be successful.

Pay Per Click ads (http://www.facebook.com/advertising): Behaving like you’d expect, Facebook’s PPC ads show up throughout the site so that users are exposed to your brand again and again.

Some success tips:

• Think about why people are on Facebook in the first place. Avoid B2B marketing and stick to B2C marketing because lots of people still separate their life from their work. You’ll likely have more success with topics like home, lifestyle, beauty, dating, entertainment, and wealth-creation.
• Consider putting an image in your ad that resembles a Facebook profile picture because people will more likely look at it.
• And here’s an anecdotal observation: Facebook ads are among the worst-written PPC ads online so a well-written ad will help to set you apart from the crowd. You don’t get much space so consider a heavy benefits-oriented ad.
• Don’t try to sell your entire product or service in the ad. You don’t have enough space. Give a teaser and entice them to click. That’s it.

Pages (http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages). If you’re familiar with Facebook, you know what a profile is. Each user has one. Facebook Pages look and act like profiles, but they aren’t about an individual; they’re about an organization or a band or a business. People become fans of whatever it is your page is about.

Some success tips:

• Creating a page is not unlike creating a profile: you’ll be most successful when you participate. Schedule time to actively post on your Wall, share links and videos, and talk to people.
• Avoid blatant encouragement to buy. Instead, think of your page as a way for people to learn more and then give them a linkout to your website to learn even more and buy. This isn’t the place for a hard-sell approach.

Share (http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?share). If your site has compelling content that people like to talk about, use the Share function to enable Facebook users to push content from your site onto their Facebook profile to share with friends.

Some success tips:

• Don’t bother including this function on your site unless you have sharable content. If you sell Analytical Studies of Historical Well Drilling Methodology to oil executives, this function is not for you. But if you’re the next YouTube, this is something to think about.

Profile: If you have a Facebook profile, use it to promote your business. (But show some restraint).

Some success tips:

• Like the Facebook Pages (above) you shouldn’t be blatantly self-promoting and don’t use hard-sell methods. Simply make sure that your website link is present on your page and talk about your business from time to time.
• Participate! This is a marketing channel that requires active participation and a lack of participation is a primary reason that this channel fails.
• Be careful about adding your URL to every outgoing email. You might trigger Facebook’s spam alert. Instead, approach Facebook just as you would approach face-to-face friendships: You’ll talk about your business sometimes and other times you’ll talk about weather or sports or whatever.

Groups: Facebook groups are like communities of people focused on a single topic. Create a group about your area of expertise and invite people to join.

Some success tips:

• Again, this is not the place for blatant self promotion. Groups are most effective when everyone participates and there is a sense of equal sharing of ideas and interest.
• Think of this as a positioning medium, not a sales medium, and your leadership as the Group’s creator will help to position you as an expert in the field.

The above are some of the marketing methods you can use on Facebook. But Facebook is not going to be a marketing method for everyone. It might blur the lines between work and life more than you prefer, or you might not have the right business to compel users to take interest in what you have to say. But if it is a good fit for your business, sign up, participate actively and become exposed to the millions of loyal users who spend hours each day on Facebook!

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