Contagious As the Swine Flu
Facebook has exploded. Everyone now, from your grocer to your financial advisor is asking you to be their “friend.” Oxford Dictionary actually selected “unfriend” as the 2009 Word of the Year, because people are thinking, talking and living Facebook.
Facebook truly is a powerful presence that is providing marketing opportunities galore. As the average age of the Facebook community continues to rise, so do the number of companies, both B2C and B2B, making Facebook an important element of their marketing plan.
And it is costing them, essentially nothing.
With the exception of pay-per-click and pay-per-impression ads, Facebook is friendly to sales and marketing budgets and requires only time, and perhaps a little bit of creativity and finesse.
So how do you cater for a party of 350 million Facebook users?
You don’t. Instead, be smart in how you join the world of Facebook and make the right connections, seek out your appropriate audiences, and mingle. Challenge. Flirt. Push. Pull. And join the conversation that may now be going on without you.
First, create a Facebook Page.
Your page will be the home base of your Facebook marketing presence. Through it, Facebook users can become your fan. When they do, your name and logo will appear on their profile page and you will be in their feed, visible to everyone in their networks. Be viral like H1N1, but be it in a good way.
Then, explore other marketing uses of Facebook:
- Promote your events and special occasions. Facebook evites are a cake walk. If you are a law firm, invite young law talent to your recruitment event…if you are a sports team, push ticket specials.
- Create Discussion Boards to solicit consumer feedback and generate brainstorms.
- Keep it exciting and timely. Make sure your Facebook page is equipped with new photos, videos and updates. Would you go to CNN.com or ESPN.com if the information never changed?
- Engage your audience with contests and polls. Let your audiences interact with you. Ask them questions, and listen to their responses. Build a game for them to play with you online. If they feel you are allowing them to impact your decisions as a company or organization, they will continue to share how they feel with you.
- Sync up your Twitter updates with your Facebook account. Take advantage of one data entry point to save time.
- Integrate Facebook with your web site. Inspire your existing site visitors to become a fan of your organization on Facebook. Add Facebook Share links on your site as well to help your fans talk to their friends about you.
- Implement the Fan Box widget on your website to gain more fans and share your Facebook updates. This implementation requires pasting only 4 lines of code.
- Or add a Comment Box to your site, allowing Facebook users on your site to comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. Sit back and let your fans promote you.
- For the gamer in you, Facebook has recently connected with XBOX Live, allowing people and companies alike to interact and connect with their networks in an entirely new way, and potentially beat them at NHL2010 or sniper them on Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.
- Try out paid social ads. Target your ads to your audience. Determine age, gender, geographic, interests, marital status, sock color, etc. Cast your net as small, or as big as you would like and pay only for performance.
- Quick!, Capture your vanity URL. Make your Facebook page easily accessible: http://facebook.com/yourcompanynamehere.
- Set up Facebook Insights to track your fans and their activity on your page. Understand who is in your Facebook network and how often they are checking out your page. Explore metrics of gender & age, page views, weekly trending, etc.
- Be sure to talk. Get out there and converse. Give them something to talk about. Be clever. Be personable. Be professional. Be responsive. Spell everything right.
- Finally, reap serious search engine optimization (SEO) benefits. Facebook pages have proven to rank very highly in Google search results, so enjoy the boost of your SEO rankings.
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