Facebook – Liking Your Way to the Top

Facebook is a very powerful social media network that has over a billion users. You’ll only want to market to a small portion of these 1 billion users, but knowing that the reach spans every country and continent is an important component in using Facebook as a channel in your social media marketing campaigns.
It’s important that you are where your customers are, and your customers are on Facebook. They spend several hours on social media networks like Facebook. In fact, they’re often using Facebook right alongside doing other activities such as watching TV or attending the movies. People literally have Facebook at their fingertips with their mobile devices active and available to share anything that they feel like sharing at any given time, day or night.
The important thing to remember with Facebook, like with other social media, it’s all about the conversations you can have with your customers and future customers. It’s not about shouting from the roof tops about your sales, or your products, or yourself. It’s about freely giving of yourself to your community, and in return, your community will come to love you and buy what you’re offering because they trust you. The marketing aspects are almost an aside but they are there. They’re just not overt market square screaming “Peaches, Oranges, Apples” at the top of your lungs.
Instead, you will create a sense of community and belonging and a desire among your followers and “likes” to emulate you and do what you do, buy what you buy, and be more like you. You want to attract people to you and your content without shoving it down their throats. You will simply be inviting people to consume your content, share with their friends, and the cycle will continue.
You won’t send people directly to a sales page from Facebook like you would if you posted an advertisement. No, you’ll send them to some valuable content. That content could be in the form of an article, a blog post, a video, a slide share, a webinar, an image, a free eBook, and the list goes on and on. But, it won’t be a sales page. The wonderful Facebook platform allows you to do this without much in the way of learning. Facebook is very intuitive.
“Need to Improve Your Facebook Community?”

It’s all about the content. As you know everything online is about content. Content is what makes the Internet work. You share some valuable content, your reader then shares it with someone else, and that person shares it, and so on. It’s word-of-mouth marketing again. Buying decisions today are based on how a person feels about the company or person selling the item rather than just the item itself. That doesn’t mean you should not provide topnotch products and services — no — It means that not only do you have to provide absolutely top of the line products and services, but your audience needs to like you too.
So you need great content, but you also need the social proof to back it up. You need to have a great reputation among your target audience. Social media like Facebook is a way to attract new customers, but also a way to communicate with current customers to keep them happy and retain them.

On Facebook you should create the following:

A Personal Profile

Everyone has to start here, you can’t have any of the others without creating a personal profile.  The benefits of having a personal profile are that you will be showing the face behind the business. You can then become a public figure, build trust or network with others like you while enjoying the ability to create and share interests.

A Business Page

Your business page will allow you to brand your business, create ads, promote your blog posts, build landing tabs, advertise those tabs, determine and identify with your audience, build followers (likes), communicate with customers and prospects, create offers and discounts, connect with your audience, have an e-commerce tab, share pinned posts, and more.

One or More Facebook Groups

Facebook groups allow you to build a community, however, you will be limited to how many people can join your group. Look to Facebook for guidance on that as these numbers change. A group allows you to build a community, offer support, create a network, build a customer database, and increase engagement and conversation. Facebook groups can be open, closed and even secret.
Once you have created the above then you can move on to learn more about landing tabs, Facebook ads, and promoted posts.

• Landing Tabs  — An important part of a well designed Facebook Page, landing tabs give you a chance to make a good impression on the Facebook users who look at your page. You can use a landing tab to customize what your viewers see when they first come to your Facebook Page. Instead of them going to the wall, they can be directed to a Facebook tab which can function as a landing page that collects an email address for a newsletter, offers a discount, gives access to a catalog, or offers pretty much whatever you want to offer.
• Facebook Ads —  With Facebook Ads its super simple to create an advertisement that is targeted to your specific audience. There are so many different ways to set up ads. You can use news feed ads, side margin ads, and even use ads to get leads by offering something to your readers for free that they perceive as valuable. What’s more, you can totally customize the audience who sees your advertising down to exactly who you choose by uploading an email address list. Even if you don’t have a list to use, you can still target your advertising like never before by narrowing down the demographic who will see your ads.
• Promoted Posts —  This is an excellent way to get more new people to see your posts and updates on Facebook. It doesn’t matter what your goal is, though you should specify what it is: More “likes”, more engagement, more sales. By creating promoted posts your fans will be more likely to see what you have to say and this can be very important. It might seem odd to target your own fans but this is the best way to use promoted posts. Target your “likes” or fans and you’ll create real action.

The take away with Facebook is that it’s a very powerful social network that you cannot miss out on when using social media to promote your business. The Facebook platform is very versatile and for many marketers works a lot better than the others combined. But, you’ll need to set goals, test out your ideas, and measure the results to see what works for you and your audience.
Tomorrow:  Social Sharing with Twitter
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