by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media

More and more clients and business owners are asking about Facebook and how to use it for their business.  We have a seminar coming up on August 19 on using Facebook & Twitter for Business.  But for those who can't attend, lets look at how Facebook is becoming a highly effective solution for marketing your business.

For those who live under a rock and don't know, Facebook is the world's largets social network, with over 400 million active users.  Another fact about Facebook is that over 50 percent of Facebook users log in every day.  Users have come to rely on Facebook to stay connected, so if you have a web presence, it should be connected in some way to Facebook.

Three Ways Facebook Can Help Market Your Business

  1. Great way to interact with your customers - The best way to interact with customers and potential customers on Facebook is to launch a Business Fan Page.  It provides you a place to post current info about your industry, company.  More importantly it provides a place for users to talk about your company, your products and for you to interact with them.  Fan Pages are very cost effective in that they only cost a couple hundred dollars to hire a firm to set them up and customize them for you.  You can also hire someone to maintain them for you if you don't have the internal infrastructure to manage it yourself.  They provide you with a direct way to communicate with your customers, where direct mail can cost thousands and you may or many not get a response.  A great example of a Facebook Fan Page is Coca-Cola and the California Academy of Sciences.  Our Xstreme Media fan page can be viewed here.
  2. Facebook is a great source for consumer data - Facebook provides a very effective way to gather data about your consumers.  There are Page Insights for Business Fan Pages, that give you very detailed analytics of your visitors, including number of visits, how many return regularly, how long they stay, gender, age group, location, etc. 
  3. Facebook can help target your advertising - Another way to effectively market though Facebook is to utilize Facebook ads.  The benefit to them is the fact of how targeted you can be with who sees them.  You can select who your ad will be delivered to by age, gender, education level, location, relationship status, etc., and most importantly by keyword.   If you want to target exercise lovers, you can base your keyword targeting on the word "exercise" and Facebook will then only show your ad to those people who have exercise in their profile.  It will show you how many people on Facebook this is as well. 
All Facebook advertisers and marketers need to understand one important rule - DON'T SPAM.  Unlike traditional media where the ads and content are all about you, Facebook and social media is about creating a conversation with your consumers and providing them useful information about your industry that will make them think of you the next time they need lawn care, exercise equipment or web design.  It does take a little shift in thinking away from the traditional media model and into the consumer driven world of social media, but it is doable.  People ask, well what if someone posts something derogatory or a complaint, shouldn't I just remove it?  NO...  instead use it as an opportunity to interact with your customers and find out the source of their dislike, hopefully to correct their issue or give them a satisfactory resolve. Interactivity like this will spread like wildfire because just as they posted how much they disliked you when they were unhappy, they will post just as much about how you were understanding of their issue and helped to correct it.

A great example of this is that the Facebook Fan Page for Coca-Cola was not created by the company - it was created by two consumers who really enjoyed the product.  When Coca-Cola found it, they didn't take the page away from them, instead they let them continue to run it and even gave them a tour of their Atlanta facility.  Because it is real and authentic, more people want to visit, and it has become one of the biggest Fan Pages on Facebook.  It is a shining example of a brand using Facebook as a brand advocacy group to connect and engage with consumers - on the consumers terms.