Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged facebook
Facebook Marketing Strategies and You
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past 4 years, and my dear readers certainly have not, you already know how popular and widely used Facebook is today.
Just a couple of years back, and you had to relentlessly encourage family and friends to join this social network (probably not long after others had convinced YOU to join). Nowadays, it’s rare to find someone who isn’t on Facebook.
At last count, Facebook had over 350 million users, and this number is continuing to grow as those final stragglers jump in. Facebook overtook MySpace as the number 1 social networking website on the planet early in 2009, and is now just behind Google in terms of online traffic. So it’s not hard to understand just how important Facebook marketing has become for websites and brands everywhere.
It’s A “No Pitch” Zone
One of the most critical things to remember about social media is that they are NOT places to blatantly or endlessly pitch your brand, product or service. Do this, and you won’t be gaining any favor from most social media users, will get largely ignored, and may even receive bad reviews.
Social media is actually better used for building relationships with potential customers or clients in the market. How can you do this? Start by:
• Post helpful information and links that helps them solve a problem.
• Personally chat with them to assist with problems or answer concerns.
• Create lots of content addressing the needs of users.
The bottom line –you want to be seen as genuine and helpful. This way, word will spread that you’re the “real deal”…and before you know it, people will soon become interested in what you have to provide in terms of products and services.
So the real nitty gritty of what you have to offer shouldn’t be shared on social networking sites such as Facebook. Instead, share helpful information in the form of teasers that will interest people enough to ask questions and wonder if there’s more. Offering free stuff is always a good tactic for garnering attention, too!
Marketing On Facebook
The great thing about Facebook is that from the outset, it has encouraged all users to use the website as a means of sharing information and marketing whatever they please. As a result, it has developed many ways for users to do this. You are not obliged to use every single one of them, but a combination of them can only improve your Facebook marketing.
Fan Pages
This is probably THE marketing tool out there on Facebook. On its website Facebook describes Pages as “a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.” It is specifically designed for promoting a business and everything it has to provide. People can then become a Fan of your page and when they do this, they let their friends know that they’ve become a Fan of your page via their News Feed. The potential for your Page to gain a lot of popularity in a small period of time is great.
Events
Create events to be held at a certain date and time. Depending on your business type, they can be local, physical events, or virtual ones, for an international audience. The best part about creating an event on Facebook is that it can go viral, and before you know it, people will be attending your event in droves. It can be any one of the following:
• Seminar: It should be introductory and free but you could promote a paid one too.
• Webinar: A seminar conducted online which anyone in the world can join.
• Product/Service Launch: If you’re about to launch a new product or service, this is a good way to gain attention.
Advertising
Facebook finally introduced an advertising service about a year ago where people can put ads promoting their website or their Facebook Page and they Pay Per Click (PPC) or Impression (CPM). (It works in about the same way as Google Adwords.)
Not only can you target your ads to certain geographical locations, but given the nature of Facebook you can additionally attach your ads to various social actions. So, if you are a wedding photographer and wanted to promote your services, your ads could be set up to appear only to females between the ages of 24 and 30 and whose relationship statuses indicate they are “engaged.”
Embrace Facebook
If you want to market your website online, you’re doing yourself a grave injustice if you aren’t using Facebook marketing as one of your key strategies. Just be careful not to get caught up in it too much, or hire someone to assist you in your Facebook tactics, because it can become a very time consuming activity!
"Imagine Having One Login…For The Whole Web"
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Facebook is working hard to embed itself deep into the infrastructure of the web. So imagine if as an outside developer or website administrator you could hook into Facebook users’ data and activities directly, and persistently, for far longer than the previous limit of 24 hours? How would this change your online business model?
Organizing the world’s information in this way is an obvious affront to Google. And where Google observes links and relationships between websites from a distance, Facebook is now aiming to become the glue that connects the web itself.
The implications are thrilling, but also frightening – what if Facebook goes down?
The benefits of using a Facebook authentication system were already quite strong. Facebook’s director of products, Bret Taylor, recently explained just how strong when sharing his own struggle to grow FriendFeed – a real-time social networking company that was eventually acquired by Facebook. Users who signed up for FriendFeed via Facebook Connect were up to four times more likely to become active users than any other form of sign-up, said Taylor.
But now, beyond fostering better participation by inviting users to connect their real identities and their real relationships, web services will be able to use Facebook to explode user engagement and relationships. They can utilize Facebook’s many social plugins to uncover personalized friend activity and recommendations. And Facebook will establish persistent, dynamic links to users’ participation on connected sites around the web through its introduction of “like” buttons.
Users will now have the ability to share their interests not only by saying what they like — say, a local coffee house — but by saying what web site actually represents it — maybe a Yelp review page, instead of the establishment’s official site. Web services would be foolish not to participate.
And as a user, having your social self represent you around the web will at first be creepy but in the end quite useful. As a Facebook engineer recently put it, “Imagine if you had one login for the whole web. That would be incredible!”
Facebook.me would allow users to use Facebook as a CMS. Let’s say you’re one of those crazy MySpace holdouts who wants blinking disco lights on your profile. Fine. Make a web page, host it at whatever URL you choose, make it as hideous as you wish, and port in data that dynamically connects to Facebook. It’s not hard to imagine that many brands and small businesses might simply use this in lieu of a traditional webpage.
Another recent demo, KlugePress, gives the ability to use a customizable template and then port in Facebook event information. Only users who have been invited to the event on Facebook would be able to load a KlugePress invite. If users are logged in to Facebook and have access, they can RSVP, comment and see details just as they would on a bland Facebook event page. The data itself is carried right back to Facebook.
By inviting its developers to integrate with it so tightly, Facebook is enabling many new opportunities, but at the same time requesting an awful lot of trust, too.