How Businesses Can Leverage Facebook to Make Money
Social networking, used correctly, is a powerful marketing tool. We’ve all heard that word of mouth is the most effective way to market, and social networking lets you leverage that effectiveness. If you are looking for way to drive your ROI, consider adding Facebook to your marketing mix.
After only slightly more than three years of public existence – Facebook opened its doors to anyone with a valid email account in September 2006 – Facebook has grown to become the biggest online social network in the world. It has over 400 million users.
Facebook offers users the ability to post photos, links and messages and otherwise communicate with their friends and relations over the Internet. Facebook users love Facebook: the average Facebook user spends nearly an hour per day on Facebook. The site is also the most used social networking site on mobile phones. Marketers who are not inserting themselves into this conversation risk being ignored.
How Facebook Can Help Your Business
The easiest way to get yourself into Facebook is to create a Fan Page. Fan Pages allow businesses to interact with users profiles in an organic way, by letting the users interact with the business as if they were just another user. The New York Times has a fan page, as does AXE body spray.
There are a lot of benefits to this. When people join fan pages, they treat your brand or product as a part of their life. Consumers become more receptive to the messages or updates you send. They trade tips on ways to use your product or service with one another. They also come back to the fan page to check out games, competitions and free offers. They advertise the page to their friends.
To top it all off, the Fan Page is a great way to do research. The site comes with a way to explore the statistics of your fans with the “Page Insights” feature. Through this, you can gather valuable data on your consumers and their behaviours. Or do you want to know what flavour of ice cream you should put out? Put it in a poll, and your consumers will give you almost instantaneous advice on what you should do.
And all of this is free! Apart from the cost of getting someone to set up and run the page, your advertising costs are essentially non-existent.
Setting Up a Fan Page
The first step, creating a Fan Page, is easy. Just go here and follow the instructions. But for most marketers, Facebook’s layout might seem a little spare: whereas Myspace lets you add HTML and CSS, Facebook largely limits you to simple text. But follow some of these simple steps, and you’ll be able to create a dynamic Fan Page. For instance, this Facebook tab for Sunkist includes webisodes, photos, and Sunkist’s branding and imagery.
1. Use Static FBML to add new tabs and boxes to your page. To get started, you’ll need to download the Static FBML application. This site can also give you some tips on how to get programming with Static FBML. It works like HTML, and can help give your page a customized feel.
2. Another way to enhance your page is to use third-party applications. For instance, if you already have a twitter feed for your product or service, this application can push your tweets to your Facebook feed. You can do something similar for your blog with this Blog RSS Feed Reader.
3. Even more exciting – for your fans, at least – is the potential to incorporate Flash into your site. Use this application to post videos, widgets and games to your Fan Page. Flash helps make your page more interactive, which makes it more “sticky” – people will likely come back to your page more often and spend more time there if they find it has fun things to do.
4. And don’t forget your URL. It’s a small detail, but having a weird or awkward URL will make it more difficult for users to find you. Go here to create a customized one.
Social Marketing is a Two Way Street
Social marketing is all about dialogue. The more dialogue you create, the more likely you will get people to come back to your site and to integrate you in their lives. But if you are engaged in a dialogue, there is always the possibility that the people you are talking with might say something negative about your brand.
As a marketer and business person, your first impulse might be to stifle this, but it is not a constructive impulse. You have to allow dissent.
For instance, on the Coca-Cola Facebook fan page, the brand team filters out obvious vandalism (“Coke sucks”), but they let differing opinions remain, (“I like Pepsi”). The result? People feel the page is authentic and open, and they stick around. The page has nearly five million fans, and is one of the biggest on Facebook.
Online marketing is not only for the actual product, making a website or for allowing customers buy items ongoing. Online marketing can also include how a business proprietor can hire a work squad. The measure of people who are analyzing computers, web design, and learning to host websites proves just how productive online marketing can make the employer, the employees, and the independent contractors. And with a sufficient Internet savvy team, your business profits can increase too.
, Who would have thought, helpfull and thank you