The first stage in getting Facebook marketing underway is with a well thought out and designed Facebook page and Welcome page. The Welcome page can be produced as a mini-webpage, creating the opportunity to promote your business in a more exciting way.
Many companies use this page as the start point of developing relationships using a variety of creative approaches. Competitions, quizzes, photo promotions, voucher programmes, reward schemes plus a range of other methods can be used to engage with people and kick-start the relationship. This can be an ongoing process continuing through the Welcome page and on to the Wall.
Keeping the flow of high quality content is necessary to maintain and grow the fan base with material that should be informative, educational, humorous and shareable. A combination of words, videos and imagery all help to keep the interest high and the buzz buzzing. Incorporating links to your website, Twitter feed, YouTube videos, Flickr images and other resources such as industry news, white papers, newsletters, etc., will all aid the engagement, as might adding Facebook polls and RSS feeds to your Facebook account. Also, incorporating your own personalized pages and tabs is a great way of highlighting one or more of your special features, products or services.
One of most of effective ways of gaining Facebook fans is with Facebook advertising and Facebook offer two approaches to this.
Firstly, they offer a standard ad model (similar to Google Adwords CPC campaigns) where you buy ‘space’ on specific pages through a budgeted bidding process. Using your specific criteria you can choose audiences to target with a high degree of refinement by focusing on the groups they belong to, the organisations they follow, their age, location, gender, job and many more social and geographical parameters.
Secondly, and fairly controversially, Facebook offer a service called Sponsored Stories. This is where, for example, Company ‘A’ can use a person’s page ‘LIKE’ for Company ‘A’ as the basis for a sponsored ad. Company ‘A’ then targets an ad at the Facebook friends of the person who liked Company ‘A’. This also works for LIKES of Facebook posts and Facebook Places ‘Check-ins’. The pricing is similar to their standard ad model. Sponsored Stories is not liked by the privacy lobby and might not survive in its current form (if at all).
All advertising can be statistically monitored, evaluated and adjusted to ensure all expenditure is gaining the maximum ROI.
Facebook Places provides a ‘check-in’ service which could be beneficial for businesses that measure ‘footfall’, the point is to encourage visitors to let their Facebook friends know when and why they’re visiting your location (using a mobile device). This helps to build awareness and create interest in you business with a wider and, hopefully, mainly relevant audience. Promotions and ‘deals’ are a great way to incentivise people to visit and get them to let them their friends know.
Click here to contact us about Facebook Marketing