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How Can Businesses Promote Themselves on Facebook?

The number one reason as to why businesses do not adopt a social media strategy is because of lack of knowledge, according to a survey conducted by MarketingSherpa to small and medium sized businesses in 2009. This is why when it comes to sites like Facebook most businesses do not know where to begin. Depending on the goal of your campaign, below are some of the different strategies on how organizations can make Facebook work for them.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook Ads allow businesses to reach their exact audience and connect with real customers to your business. For instance, if a business were to run an advertisement campaign on a search engine such as Google, they basically can target their audience by telling Google the following:

• If someone searches for this specific phrase (exact, broad, phrase)
• If someone searches for it in this region, radius

However, what if you wanted to narrow your exact audience even further and target those people who are male or female? Married? Divorced? Over a certain age? This is where social networking sites like Facebook shine as they are able to provide marketers the ability to target these demographics whereas search engines such as Google do not have the data of who is actually conducting the search. As an example, if your target reach is men living in the United States that are married and over the age of 50, there are currently 2,260,940 users on Facebook that fit this demographic.

CM Photographic, a full service photography studio providing engagement, family, children and pet portraits leveraged Facebook Ads, which allowed them to target their exact demographic — 24-30 year old women whose relationship status on Facebook indicated that they were engaged. Over 12 months, CM Photographics generated nearly $40,000 in revenue directly from a $600 advertising investment on Facebook. Of the Facebook users who were directed to CM Photographics' website from the ads, 60% became qualified leads and actively expressed interest for more information (Facebook.com).


How To Maximize Your Ads on Facebook Remember Facebook is push marketing, more traditional and is different than Google Adwords in which people are actually searching for your product/service. However, the ability to narrow down your exact audience provides an opportunity for you to connect to the right people. The following should be kept in mind when creating ads on Facebook:

1. Visit www.facebook.com/business to get started and determine if there is a target audience on Facebook for your product or service based on the demographics you wish to reach
2. Visit http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=861 to learn more about writing optimal ads, character limits, image size and resolutions, and terms and conditions
3. Always tag your ads using parameters in the destination URL, so you can determine using your analytics which ad copy or image is driving the best results.

Facebook Pages

A Facebook Page will allow you to build a business page for your organization, in which you can promote your products and services, connect with your customers and build your brand. One of the main reasons businesses are afraid to build a page on Facebook is because they do not want to mix their personal lives with their business network. So for example, pictures of me at a New Year’s party holding 3 beers in my hand might not sit too well or best represent my organization to my business contacts. However, there is a way to completely separate your business page with your personal account. You do need to have a personal account in order to first develop the page, but the privacy setting will then allow you to have control of what information you want users to see and separate your personal and business account.

Once your Facebook Page is created, you can then start to populate it with pictures, images, information, videos that reflect your brand. If you are already on other social networks such as Twitter, YouTube or blogs, there are methods in which you can customize your Facebook Fan Page to automatically pull information from those mediums into the Facebook Page.

Below is a sample of how a blog post is configured to go directly into a Facebook Page.


Not only does configuring your social sites (website, blog, articles, press releases, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to work with each other save time, it will allow you to get your information out to your valued subscribers no matter which network they are engaged on. Also from a search engine perspective, the more your content gets syndicated, the higher the probability of it appearing directly in the search engine results page.

The image below is from the Budweiser Canada Facebook Page, which shows you can really customize the look and feel of your Facebook Page to reflect your website, landing page, email template or offer.

Get the Word Out!

Now that you have your Facebook Page, how can you let people know about it? Here are some different ways to promote your Facebook Page to your customers and start the interaction.

1. Send out an email blast to your list letting them know your organization is now on Facebook
2. Place a logo on your website that lets your current visitors know that they can follow you on Facebook
3. Run a contest or promotion as an incentive to get people to join
4. Run a Facebook Ad Campaign targeting your demographics and invite them to join your fan page. Again incentives are great here!

Facebook Events

Another way of leveraging Facebook for business purposes is by posting your events directly on Facebook. Let’s say for instance that you are running an event and you have posted it on your website for people to register. The goal would be to have users complete the form and register for the event, and after doing so, they might receive an auto responder thanking them for reserving their seat.

Take the same scenario and imagine if you had used Facebook to post your event. Remember Facebook was designed to allow information to be passed through easily amongst friends. So this means if a user decides to attend the event on Facebook, a notification will be posted on their wall (page) letting their entire network know they are attending.

So in scenario #1 where you post the event on your website the user gets an email. In scenario #2 the users confirms their attendance but at the same time their entire network now can see this – which might persuade them to attend as well.

From an admin standpoint, the Facebook Events feature allows you to send a direct message to all the guests you had invited, including those who have confirmed their attendance, declined or have not yet decided/responded.

Conclusion

The reality is Facebook is not a phase and is here to stay. Businesses need to determine how they can monetize this network if they wish to compete and stay in front of their customers. Facebook can no longer be seen as the site where college students go to socialize about the latest fashion or party – as statistics show the fastest growing demographics two years ago was those 35 years and older, and today it is woman over 55 (InsiderFacebook.com). In fact, 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years and older! Businesses need to consider sites like Facebook as part of their marketing mix; otherwise the risks of not being present can actually open the door for competitive or negative brand exposure. So if you have not already, it’s about time to give your online marketing strategy a face-lift by joining Facebook!