An Introduction to Marketing on Facebook

Blue Fountain Media’s Jon Gelberg on how to make the social network an integral part of your overall marketing strategy.

Love it or hate it, Facebook is here to stay. With more than 400 million users, it represents a massive audience for your company’s message. Your current customers and clients are on Facebook, as are your prospective customers and clients. Along with display and search advertising, Facebook should be an integral part of your digital marketing mix.

Here are some of the most recent statistics:

As Facebook evolves, companies are trying to figure out just how much time, effort and money they should be spending on their presence there. While some major companies have dived in with multi-faceted Facebook campaigns, others have stood on the sidelines.

The problem with Facebook is that the great majority of visitors go to the site for personal reasons. Users want to communicate with friends, post vacation pictures and just tell the world what they’re up to. As a rule, they are not in a “business” frame of mind. This is in stark contrast to LinkedIn, which is heavily geared to the business community.

Does this mean that businesses should ignore Facebook? Abolutely not!
The first thing to understand is that there are two kinds of pages on Facebook: user profiles and “Pages.” Individual profiles are the personal profiles that kids and adults (i.e., individual users) create to keep the world updated on their activities.


Pages, on the other hand, are designed to create a Facebook presence for brands, organizations and businesses. Pages are commonly used by businesses as marketing tools. Facebook makes it simple to create these pages.

Pages can be simple or elaborate. Since the page reflects on your business, it is important to do it right. Elements of your Page should include:

• Clear identification of your brand, including:
  • Photos and logos
  • Brand messaging
  • Your services
  • Your products
• Company messaging
  • Humanizes your executives and employees
• Offerings:
  • Sales
  • Special events
  • Facebook “exclusives”

Facebook offers a variety of tools to make your page look professional, including Facebook’s own version of HTML to help you style your pages, called Facebook Markup Language (FBML). As in any marketing presentation for your company, the more professional and fresh content that you can provide, the more effective it will be in helping your company achieve a high ROI on its Facebook marketing investment.

Direct links to e-commerce
Your company’s Facebook Page is just one click away from your company’s e-commerce site. You should try to parlay your captive Facebook audience into direct sales with compelling offers on your Facebook Page. Below is an example of how apparel retailer Gap uses Facebook to drive traffic to its store.

Deals
People are always looking for deals, and Facebook gives businesses an opportunity to provide exclusive promotions to their Facebook fans. Not only do you reach a captive audience with each offering, you can measure the success of the campaign by having it exclusive to Facebook.
Modell’s sporting goods has embraced Facebook as a marketing and sales tool by offering a “Facebook Fridays” program where the company offers discount coupons exclusively to their Facebook fans.

Integrate with other marketing channels
Cooking.com regularly runs offers and contests exclusive to Facebook users, but promotes them across its newsletters. This allows the brand to connect newsletter subscribers to the brand’s Facebook presence, increasing the chances that future marketing efforts will reach them successfully.

User-generated content
Papa John’s has more than 1.1 million fans on Facebook. Papa John’s does a terrific job of engaging its fans both with special offers and with social engagement. Recently,  the company encouraged Facebook users to click the “like” button (which connects users’ profiles to the Papa John’s page) in exchange for a chance to “win a slice of the sales” and free pizza for life.

This is just one example of getting your visitors involved in your Facebook efforts. Other devices include contests, polls, lotteries and “featured fan” promotions.

The Facebook wall
Another major way of encouraging user-generated content is to allow fans make comments on a company’s wall. This has multiple benefits. It makes fans feel like they have a relationship with their brand. And it gives them an opportunity to praise the brand, make criticisms or suggestions, and just let their voices be heard.
This, in turn, becomes a great vehicle for customer service. So long as the wall is regularly monitored and the company is responsive to comments, it can create a tremendous customer relations channel at relatively little cost.

While it may be impossible to respond to every post, when faced with repeated concerns or suggestions, it is a terrific idea to reach out—directly—to your fans, listen to them, and find solutions.

Facebook Ads
Facebook served more banner ads in the first quarter of 2010 than any other website. The reason for the explosive growth in Facebook advertising is that it gives advertisers the opportunity to target ads with remarkable precision.
Advertisers can target ads based on myriad variables, including:

• Age
• Education
• Location (all the way down to zip codes)
• Gender
• Workplace
• Interests
• Relationship status (single, engaged, married)

Using multiple variables, you can actually use Facebook Ads to deliver an ad to a single individual. Facebook’s targeting tool will tell you the exact number of people you will reach with any specific set of targeted factors.

Too big to ignore
This is just a small sample of the ways in which businesses are using Facebook to engage current customers and entice new ones. Before diving in to the world of Facebook, business owners should do a bit of research, asking these types of questions:

• What offers and services are companies providing on Facebook?
• What presence do key my competitors have on Facebook?
• What marketing tools are working for my company in other online platforms?

Any business that chooses to ignore a universe of more than 400 million potential customers is making a huge mistake. For many of our clients, we find that Facebook advertising brings a very positive ROI on their marketing investments.
— Jon Gelberg


Jon Gelberg is Chief Content Officer at Blue Fountain Media, a website development and online marketing company headquartered in New York City and serving clients worldwide. For more useful insights from Jon and his team, check out the Blue Fountain Learning Center , where a version of this article first appeared.