Facebook is among the top networking sites that businesses consider for marketing today. Especially small business, which are trying to find their footing, can use this social media platform for cost-effective marketing. Sadly, only a few of these businesses have been successful in making optimal use of the site’s functionality to effectively market their brand. For one, these businesses do not spend enough time to explore the options that Facebook provides them. Even if they do, they fail to use them to their advantage.
Creating Your Facebook Page
Considering that Facebook attracts a number of people from different walks of life, it can be considered as a great marketing channel for different kinds businesses like restaurants, ecommerce sites, media or news sites, charities and retailers. And the first step to a successful Facebook marketing campaign is to create the right kind of business page on the site. The key things to consider for creating a Facebook business page include what you intend to achieve via Facebook, the population you are targeting, and how much time and money you intend to spend on it.
When rightly used, Facebook can help different businesses achieve different marketing goals.
How to Market Your Business on Facebook
Here are the things you should do for effectively marketing your business on this social media platform.
Make it Simple, but Effective
Do you know how easy or difficult it is for your customers to find you or like you on Facebook? The goal of having a Facebook business page is to attract as many people to like it as possible, paving way for online word-of mouth marketing. If you want your customers to like you or share your link on Facebook, the basic thing is to make the Facebook buttons and widgets easily accessible to them on your homepage.
Make use of the different plugins that Facebook has to offer, rather than just the “like” button. Use the ‘share’ button for a stronger impact, use the “subscribe” button if you have a newsletter and the ‘recommendations’ button for your blog posts, and place them to enable easy access.
Use the Facebook Plugins
There are a number of Facebook plugins that can be used to your advantage. One such feature is ‘visible-to-connection’, using which you can offer special discount coupons, vouchers, samples and sneak peeks of your upcoming products and events exclusively to your connections on the site. This is great not just to promote your products, but also for attracting more people to ‘like’ or ‘subscribe’ to your Facebook page.
Reward Your Fans
Getting people to visit and like your Facebook marketing page is just the first step. If you want them to stay on your page and do what you want them to do, you need to reward them with something special. The best thing to do for this is to create special promotions exclusively for your Facebook connections. The right kind of promo not only makes them loyal to you, but also encourages them to share it with their friends on the network.
Offline Promotion of Your Facebook Marketing Page
No matter how excellent your Facebook page is, you can make it a hit only when your customers know that it exists. So, use the other offline marketing tools and get your existing customers to visit your Facebook marketing page first. That way, you can easily get more ‘likes’ and make your page popular quickly.
What to Avoid in Facebook Marketing
Doing the right things would be good, provided you don’t quash them with the wrong ones. Here are a few mistakes you should avoid for successful Facebook marketing.
Broadcasting/Selling
The first, and perhaps the biggest, mistake in Facebook marketing is selling or broadcasting. Remember that Facebook is one of the most effective tools for word-of mouth marketing. But direct selling can be a major put off and is the best tool to keep away users from your page. So interact, but don’t broadcast.
Uninteresting Posts
If you want to get noticed on Facebook, you need to be interesting. But several business owners forget that when it comes to marketing on Facebook. To make your marketing campaign successful, be sure to spend time on updating your page regularly with interesting content that your audience is most likely to read and share. Then again, avoid using “filler” content and being repetitive. This will only make you predictable and boring.
Violating the T&C
Implementing the perfect Facebook-marketing plan in the right way makes the campaign powerful. But even your best laid plans can fail if you remember to do everything, but fail to understand how it actually works. So, before you get started with marketing on Facebook, it is best to spend as much time as you can to explore the site and go through the terms and conditions to avoid violating them. Otherwise, you may end up in the bad books of the site, and lose all opportunities to reach out to a huge audience through it.
