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Why Business Should Promote Themselves On Facebook

Facebook is not for every business, and most organizations will use Facebook in different ways. First you need to determine if your target audience, your customers, your clients or prospects are even on Facebook. Whether you are B2B or B2C, Facebook can be a platform, which your organization can leverage. Here are some of the different reasons why most businesses should start to engage themselves on Facebook if they have not already.

Protecting Your Brand on Facebook

One of the biggest fears that organizations have about connecting on Facebook is if people start to talk negatively about them. Why open up a can of worms where people all over the world can have an open conversation, right? The reality is, anyone can create a Facebook Page about your company, or start a blog, or upload a video to YouTube etc. If businesses do not start the conversation, they leave the control up to their customers who might be frustrated, or even competitors that simply want to damage the company’s brand. Have a look below at some of the Facebook Fan Pages dedicated to companies in a negative way.

Just some examples:

   

Protecting Your Brand on Google

Have you ever searched for a company name, brand name or product in a search engine before you made a purchase or decided to do business with that organization? Your online brand is extremely important to monitor and manage. Having one negative listing in the top 10 results of a search engine could be enough to have prospects steer away, leave your existing customers in a state of panic, and damage your brand to the point where business starts to go south.

This is where almost any business online regardless of their product, service or target audience can leverage Facebook. Businesses can use Facebook simply as another landing page to tell visitors about their company. The fact that Facebook is a creditable source, has a high page rank, is updated frequently and has millions of pages and links are all reasons for Google to rank a Facebook Business Page on page one of Google. This is very similar to having your business listing on a site like Wikipedia, which also comes up high in the search results.

Every time you obtain a page one ranking in Google, you push down any of your competitors and negative listings that may be impacting your brand. Combining this strategy with other social sites will allow an organization to dominate page one of Google for your branded term. For example, if a user was to search for the phrase MSNBC, which is a cable news channel in the United States, you can see the areas in yellow to the left that outline social media channels such as Wikipedia, Twitter and Blogs that MSNBC is leveraging as well as their Facebook Page in green.

How To Get Your Branded Name on Facebook:

1. It is important you build your Facebook Fan Page with your branded name such as www.facebook.com/yourcompany
2. To do this, go to www.facebook.com/username once your fan page has over 25 fans and you can reserve a vanity URL for your business.

Connecting with Your Customers

Since we know the average user on Facebook spends more than 55 minutes on the site per day, businesses really have no option but to use this medium as another channel to connect with their customers. Instead of waiting for your clients to come to your website to find out what is new, why not push the information directly to them on channels where they hang out? You cancollect feedback, get your products reviewed, receive testimonials, push out promotions, get users to participate in contests, print out coupons; the possibilities are endless.

Take for example Nisim International, a company which is dedicated to solving hair worries, whether you have too much (hair removal products) or have too little (hair growth products). Using Facebook, they were able to grow their fan base to over 1000 fans and start pushing out promo codes in which they can track and measure to see what medium, message, and offer was bringing in the most value. One of their latest promotions was to use the promo code “Haiti” in which users received a 25% discount off their order, and Nisim in turn would have also matched the discount with a donation to the Direct Relief International for Haiti. Within 12 hours, they received 32 new orders specifically for this promotion.

On a bigger scale, Burger King launched a Facebook campaign called the Whopper Sacrifice. They had developed an application and asked Facebook Users to sacrifice or “de-friend” (delete) 10 of their friends on Facebook and in turn they would receive a free Whopper. The campaign, which had taglines such as “Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger,” went viral quickly as each time someone would delete their friend, the application was built to send out a notification to their entire network that they had done so. However, Facebook stated this was against their terms and asked Burger King to remove the application, which they did - but not before 233,906 friendships had already been sacrificed for a Whopper.

For Optimization Purposes

If Search Engine Optimization (being found on page one for your key phrases) is important to your business, then there is a way to leverage Facebook as well. Apart from having your personal brand name listed on page one of Google using Facebook as previously outlined, you can use the video section inside Facebook to build exposure the same way.

Facebook video is not as popular as YouTube video, but statistics show there are about 260,000 videos uploaded to Facebook each day (Techcrunch). Chuck Bankoff, a WSI Consultant located in Los Angeles, had optimized a video about his services and syndicated the video to various channels such as YouTube, AOL Video, Google Video, Daily Motion and also Facebook. The video was being optimized for the term Digital Marketing Strategy Los Angeles – a long term phrase but he wanted to see the power of video optimization. In 24 hours, his video was on page one of Google; however, because the root word Digital Marketing Strategy is competitive (26,900,000 competing sites), all the videos were pushed down to page two or three of Google with the exception of the video that he had uploaded to Facebook. Today, as of March 17 2010, the video on Facebook is ranking #1 in Google for the term Digital Marketing Strategy Los Angeles and #2 for the term Marketing Strategy Los Angeles.

How To Maximize Your Video Optimization On Facebook:

1. Name the video file with your keyword phrase – this is one method to indicate to the search engines what your video is about. Example: MarketingStrategyLosAngeles.avi
2. When you upload the video, Facebook will allow you to provide a Title and Description of the video, make sure that both these fields have your keyword phrase