Facebook Marketing and Social Media Trends
Posted by Will Byrd on Mon, Feb 06, 2012 @ 10:22 AM
The Latest Social Media Trends and Facebook Marketing
Facebook has a member base approaching 800 million, although other social media trends have appeared such as Google+, effective Facebook marketing is essential to attract and retain potential customers, keep them engaged and build brand awareness. It’s certainly never going to go away, and with an increased number of business owners reporting they are attracting new customers from Facebook regularly, it’s a marketing platform that should be mastered.
It’s very easy to get distracted on Facebook, so if you want to get your Facebook marketing campaign underway, concentrate on a few tips we have included have for you below.
Create a Business Page not a Personal Profile
You can’t run a business from a personal profile page, you can only have 5,000 friends maximum but a Business Page is unlimited and obviously a much better choice for Facebook marketing. Don’t worry, if you created a Profile for your business, you can easily convert it to a Business Page.
Use your business or brand as an extension on the Facebook URL. It’s more memorable and looks more professional. Your URL would be http://www.Facebook/yourbrand.
Add Content from Different Sources
Just like a website or blog add fresh content to your wall daily to keep visitors engaged. You can connect your own blog to your Facebook business page and publish content automatically if you use WordPress.
If you are familiar with WordPress, they offer a way to add any number of posts that can be scheduled to post at different times. This means you’re not completely tied to your site posting content every day. You can do the same with Facebook by using Hootsuite.
Let other people create your content for you by tagging other users and Pages. This will make your Pages more interactive and retain visitors longer. Under “Manage Permissions” simply enable “Users can write or post content.”
When you post a link make sure it has a snappy meta description for when it gets shared on Facebook.
One of the reasons you’re running a Facebook marketing campaign may be to generate leads. Optimize your business pages for lead generation with calls to action via one of your custom tabs.
Engage your fans even more by placing a poll on your business page, find out what they want, what they like or don’t like so you can tailor your Facebook marketing to their needs.
Keep Your Content Organized
Keep your Facebook Business Pages tidy by creating custom tabs for different functions. Make a Welcome Page and use it as a landing page, then add a tab for customer testimonials, one for special offers and promos etc. A Welcome Page can be set as the first page your visitors come to. Use it as a landing page to gather leads, introduce yourself and encourage people to like Like your business.
With any marketing campaign you need to see what’s working and what isn’t. You can use Facebook Insights, a built-in tool to help your business gather data for your Facebook marketing campaign.
Pictures & Video
Recycle your YouTube content so it can be seen on your Business Pages.
SlideShare allows you to post five pictures. It doesn’t sound much but if you look around at how big businesses use the application, you’ll get some great ideas for building your own SlideShare presentation. You can also hook up to your Flickr account and show off those photos on your Facebook page too.
Communicate
There are two main aspects that can be automated in Facebook using third party software and that is content posting and scheduling. Remember this is social media so you need to keep a hands-on personal touch to your site to engage your readers. You will never be able to press a button and forget about your Facebook pages for weeks on end. Answer your comments promptly and interact. When people visit your website and hit the Facebook Share button, they will expect to see totally different, dynamic and more engaging on your Facebook pages.
Group chat has recently been introduced on Facebook which means you can chat with any user who is active in the Group Chat Box or pane. This has many possibilities and could be used for running a small focus group or a Q&A session.
If you work with others who are willing to participate in your Facebook marketing efforts, give them permission to become an Administrator. It will add more voices, opinions and content to the site, and can give you some necessary time off!
Customize
If you run a bilingual business, you can post in Spanish and English for example, and send the appropriate post to different fans. This gives a more personal touch, and doesn’t clutter their pages up with stuff they don’t need or understand.
You can also grab the Google+ extension, add a tab to your Google+ account to access your news feed. You can perform many tasks on your Facebook pages from within your Google+ account.
Advertise
Once you’re satisfied that your business pages are set up correctly, functioning well and attracting new business, the next step in your Facebook marketing campaign may be to pay for some effective and highly-targeted advertising.
