Learn the critical 5 starter tips for Facebook success
Once restricted to use by individuals (students), Facebook has become a valuable business tool, both as a communication tool, but also as a (social) traffic and leads generating one.
If becoming a Facebook social media marketer makes you wonder where to begin, here are five things you should do on Facebook for your company and small business.
We assume that you have a profile set up on Facebook already. You’ll need to set up and verify your account via the mobile option and email.
Let’s get started.
The number one reason for Facebook Fans Revealed
Lots of materials emerging on Facebook every day now. It’s exciting.
From setting up a new profile, optimization of Facebook for search engines (SEO), adding pictures, videos and how to communicate with your fans and ‘likers’. This also includes basic human (one-to-one) communication strategies, how to elicit better/more responses from your audience, how and where to share personal and business-centric information, tools to help you structure an optimal Facebook experience for yourself and others.
Of course, a profile is only part of the journey to Facebook success (defined broadly) for business success. You must also seriously take a look at how to setup and manage fan pages, including different ways to drive traffic there. That of course include paid advertising as well. It’s not uncommon to get traffic for 1c these days, depending on skill-level and marketplace positioning. Some markets, and in the B2B marketplaces, you may apply more of the ninja-like approach, but it’s still doable. Imagine targeting a specific company and/or officers.
However, everybody is focused on getting fans. That’s good, but do you really know why you need fans? What’s the most important reason to get fans to YOUR Facebook world?
Do you run your business on Facebook or Google? In this guest post, Mr. Cooper Elling breaks down his personal Facebook story, and why you ought to consider Facebook today.
Facebook is an extremely powerful tool for business.
Now that everyone seems to be on Facebook, your business can use it to connect with, well, almost everyone.
Many people use the social networking site to create an active forum for users, and as another tool for brand or service awareness.
But, what about actually running your business almost entirely with Facebook?
Monetizing Social Media? Make money from social conversations? How is that possible? How can I make money using Twitter, Facebook or YouTube? You are probably asking these questions right now.
While the answers may be many-fold, it’s pretty clear that if you don’t have the basics covered: a good product or service along with a (people) support system and technology to help, you’ll never make any money on social media.
Selling other people’s products (affiliate marketing) and avoiding customer support issues and hiding behind the computer is not what I’m talking about. (Sidenote: Yes, some are making big bucks as affiliates, just check out clickbank.com).
Here is one way to make money on Facebook if you already have products to sell.
Facebook is hugely successful, and now gets more page views than Google. Boasting 600+ million users worldwide with an array of applications, tools and fantastic demographics ad serving, Mr. Zuckerberg and teams can be very proud of what they’ve done.
However, in a recent array of legal documents from one of the original founders, Paul Ceglia – the case of “originality” and “ownership split” is SERIOUSLY brought into question.
The below image appears to show Mr. Zuckerberg being purposely deceitful about the state of “TheFacebook” during this 2004 email exchange. The email allegedly indicates that The Face Book website was not doing great, and Mark was ready to abandon it. Turns out, it was a raging success.
What do you think? Do you care?
Facebook has become one of the most popular networking sites currently running on the internet.
With options to post pictures, videos, status updates, and more, it’s no wonder Facebook is becoming a household name.
Are you on Facebook? Well, with over 600 million users, the answer is going to be “likely”.
What if you don’t want to be on Facebook – and delete the account permanently?
Image via Wikipedia
Facebook made a recent announcement about changes to their page structure, and in specific the individual Pages (brand or fan pages).
The Facebook platform is evolving, and we knew changes were coming (iFrame use for FBML, for example). Now we know what to look for. The new changes will make Pages look more like the current profile pages – more integrated across the platform. Good!
The complete changeover will done by March 10, 2011.
Make sure to review these changes along with the Involver graphic example:
If you look at this recent chart from Comscore, you’ll see fairly rapid declining trends for Yahoo and AOL. You knew that right?
But, did you know that Facebook has surpassed Google in % share of time spent?
Pretty revealing all this “social stuff”. Google, what do you have up your sleeve this year?
Hmmm.. doesn’t come around too often…
Image via CrunchBase
Well, for Mark Zuckerberg his “investment” into Facebook is paying off. And, with the recent infusion of investment dollars and the expected Facebook IPO 2012, here’s how the money breaks down.
There are many others than Mr. Zuckerberg who stands to make tons of money as well.
Check out the recent chart from Business Insider.
Want to structure your ads to solicit the highest click-through rates (CTR) on Facebook?
A recent study collected data to show the top targets for the most successful click-throughs from Facebook ads.
Clearly, an opportunity to make sure your demographics targeting and your ads attract these types of markets – media, entertainment and blog sites. (Testing is your best friend, don’t trust data alone though).
What does the chart show?
If you have not begun building Fan Pages on Facebook, you should consider starting. In fact, if you don’t – you’ll be left behind.
Can you imagine setting up an ad, with a picture, link to your website + a social “like” indicator in about 30 minutes. Then, after a quick approval have it shown to potentially millions of people?
And, depending on your targeting, copy and overall testing of pages, ads, pictures and links – you can get hundreds of targeted visitors in hours?
But – as with anything – it requires skills and knowledge. You must leverage every cent wisely.
One of the the cool things about a Facebook fan page is that you can engage a user to take action right away.
You can show an “entry/welcome” page. Then, depending on your copywriting / sales and messaging skills, entice a visitor to your fan page to “Like” the page before continuing.
You can check www.facebook.com/oreo for a good example on how it might work.
How do set up a Fan Page to only show your “real stuff” when liking it?
There are reasons why people do NOT want to use Facebook. And, while many have started accounts with Facebook, stayed for a while… they would leave again. And, some in disgust, horror and by virtue of demonstration: I don’t need Facebook to survive!
Here is a compelling reason – and one you may not have thought of. Why is it that people do not join Facebook at all?
Here’s what 2,500 people over 18 years of age said.
Check out this chart:
The biggest spike of data shows a waste of time, with privacy as a fairly close second. Obviously the data is fairly small, but gives us an idea if your friends haven’t joined — why they may not!
With Facebook reaching higher traffic numbers than Google, and with users nearing 600 million worldwide, you have a huge platform to share your message. Add the amazingly detailed demographics and geographic targeting options and competitive bidding, you have a people platform that cannot be ignored.
Here are some tips to use Facebook advertising to its full potential.
A few things happen along the Internet timeline that changes the game.
Today is such a day. Especially for local business opportunities and the growing mobile population. (Hey, biz owners: are you listening?)
Introducing Facebook Deals.
You are hopefully already familiar with Facebook Places (no, not Google Places).
With Facebook places already set up, you can tell your friends about your place/location when you check-in.
And – NOW: you get can get deals from these places, and share them with friends.
Here’s what to do:
You download the latest Facebook App (updated today). When touching “check-in” you’ll see a list of places. (You may need to open the “places” link first). The list now has a yellow or green ticket next to the establishment or listing.
Touch the ticket, and you’ll see the deal. Once you check in, you can claim that deal. Just follow the instructions.
Facebook is a powerhouse of a social networking platform. Over 500,000,000 million users and going for 600 million around the corner. Lots of activity (understatement of the year).
This is a post about mistakes you should not make when you are thinking about using Facebook as a platform for friend building – and customer building (read: Facebook ads) *isn’t it really one and the same?
What are the 7 mistakes you are making using Facebook today?
If you have created a Facebook account and a fan page to go along with your overall marketing strategy, you’ll also want to promote your page to gain a greater following. Let’s show you how you roll them out!
Remember, announcements on your fan page about upcoming sales, giveaways, sweepstakes or big news cost you nothing to send out to your fan base.
It will serve you well to grow your base by as much as possible. And, the power of “social proof” can help as well.
Studies show that pages that have many fans (friends) and “likes” do better in terms of sharing, traffic potential and branding too.
There are many potential ways you can cross promote your activity on Facebook with other off- and online efforts.
High quality traffic matters more than just “any” traffic. (I’ll share some results from a recent inexpensive social traffic campaign I ran – in another, future post).
Facebook is the most targeted traffic you can get on the web today.
I can drill down into their demographics and topic selections and show you an ad at the place you work, if I wanted to! (scary)
If you’re new to online marketing, you may not understand the value of garnering high quality traffic or even what it means. In the advertising world – offline as well as online – quality traffic is everything.
Let’s say you’re the owner of a brick-and-mortar store that sells kitchen items. What kind of shoppers would you want to come through your door?
HTML (hypertext markup language) is the technical language of the web.
There have been different versions of this since its inception, but simply stated: it’s a tags and scripts system that speaks to your web browser.
This way, images, text and objects you place and position within tables, margins or stylesheets, render nicely onto your screen.
FBML (facebook markup language) is a similar version for the Facebook platform.
It’s a custom application that makes it easy to control your objects in a fan page. However, if you are not a professional web designer or developer, these “languages” can be the obstacle between you and your customers.
Recently, a friend told me:
“I’m giving up on Facebook ads. They don’t work, and I’m just losing money on crap, and I don’t ‘get’ their ad policies”.
Pretty bad, I know. And, this person is a professional, and doing very well on Google Adwords and with affiliate marketing. The Facebook platform is completely different in the way of operating as compared to Adwords. True, they have a CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per mille/thousand impressions) based bidding system, ads, but that’s about where the similarities end.
He was further very mad about the fact that Facebook didn’t approve any of his ads, and even told him that the landing pages were horrible (ie. they could “infest” a persons machine). I learned that affiliates are now “hated” by Facebook, and unless you spend an insane amount (read: a lot) of media dollars, you are shut out, like so many top players in the affiliate game.
Knowing this – my friend shrugged, but finally understood why, so he got some relief.
But, Facebook can drive massive traffic to your brand, and is one of the best targeting platforms you can use right now. It is a blessing for the online marketers and businesses who have started, and stayed with it. A friend in the insurance business gets more leads from Facebook than anything in Google 6 months prior!
What to do?
If you are running advertising campaigns on Google (Adwords), you are likely frustrated about how expensive keywords and marketplace bidding has gotten.
With the laws of supply and demand, it’s expected to see this trend of saturation and competitive bidding. Therefore, it is important to keep reviewing and expanding your advertising options. With the new Bing-Yahoo integration, you can get up to speed on Bing Advertising and take advantage of an expanding platform with much better pricing.
However, Facebook is receiving massive traffic and attention, growing fast, and the Facebook advertising platform and marketplace is still fantastic for newcomers. You can get it for low cost now.
You must understand the basics of ad copy and especially facebook landing page layout, design and on-page factors, among several other things. A friend in the business tried to get his website listed, but because of affiliate landing pages, he was dismissed
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