How to Effectively Use Facebook as a Social Media Marketing Tool

Social Media Marketing has become a buzzword, used to describe the promotion of businesses through social networks online. Not only is it now a necessary tool to ensure that your business is up to date in the foreground of technology, but it is also crucial in providing the public with ‘real time’ information on what is happening within your organization.

It is common knowledge that Facebook is now one of the largest and most important players in the social networking arena and provides businesses a circus of opportunities to build and promote their brand.

But with such a dominant tool being used by so many people, what steps should you be taking with your business to ensure that you’re using Facebook efficiently?

With all the time and hard work put into achieving original and interesting content, it would be a shame for it to go unseen.

Business not Pleasure

Firstly, it is crucial to understand that in order to promote your brand, you must create a business page on Facebook. Setting up your profile on a personal page allows the public to access you as a ‘friend’ but not in a formal capacity.

Stephanie Liechtenstein, founder and president of Micro Media Marketing, states that there are three main problems with using personal Facebook profiles within business:

1. Personal profiles do not have the same functionality as business profiles. By setting up your business in the wrong format, you are limiting what you are capable of in terms of promoting your brand in an effective and professional manner
2. Setting your brand up on a personal profile may seem like a friendly way of approaching the public. In fact, it is not only annoying to people on Facebook, having businesses approach them  across an inappropriate forum, it also looks highly unprofessional and devalues the brand you are trying to sell. For example, if you were a web design business and you did this,  it would make other users think your brand does not know how to set up a business page on Facebook, let alone how to build a website, thus devaluing your brand name.
3. Facebook, as a company, views businesses setting up personal profiles as an inappropriate way of using the website. Because of this, any businesses they find with personal profiles are shut down, which can have a detrimental effect on the image of your brand and can prevent further use of an extremely beneficial tool.

Hit Your Target

Einstein famously stated:

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

This is an important quote to remember and apply to your social media efforts.

For example, if you own a fashion business with a range of costume jewelry aimed at teenage girls, running a campaign that encompasses everyone from sports-addicted men to professional middle aged business women is inefficient and cost ineffective. If you want your brand only reaching teenage girls, then only send the message to teenage girls.

Facebook business pages have an excellent tool whereby businesses can set targeted campaigns and adverts to promote the page, a competition or the website. That way, you will find a better conversion and response rate to the brand you are promoting as you are only advertising to individuals likely to be interested in what you are offering.

If you are unaware of who would be the most effective target audience, Facebook gives business pages the ability to access and measure the demographics of individuals viewing your page, talking about you and ‘liking’ your releases. This information can be used to drive a campaign to the correct audience.

Promote your Posts

The ability to promote posts on Facebook is a relatively new tool that has been added to business pages. If your business has more than 400 ‘likes’ on Facebook, you can access this in order to have your brand viewed by the public more easily and effectively.

To do this, you click ‘promote’ under the post and then choose a budget depending on the target number of people you wish to reach. By doing this, your post will appear in the ‘Sponsored’ section of your fans’ Newsfeed on Facebook which means better coverage of your brand, a more professional image and more control over your Facebook fans and target audience. A promoted post is an extra link to your website and can help to drive more people through your page.

It is extremely cost effective with just $5 securing your brand hundreds more views, and it is also incredibly easy to set up and have running.

Spreading like Wildfire

Lastly, an extremely handy third party application which can help to drive traffic to your brand through Facebook, is Wildfire.

With Wildfire, you have the functionality to run contests and campaigns for a 30 day period for little more than $100, which is an extremely cost effective method of spreading your brand to targeted audiences.

What makes this tool so useful though, is the ability to collect ‘likes’ through competitions which releases extra functionality on Facebook (such as promoted posts which need 400 likes) and it also allows you to collect email addresses, therefore expanding your contact network.

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