Using Facebook As A Marketing Tool – Part 1
Here’s something that may surprise you.
In its February 2012 report, social-media service Shareaholic found that almost 7% of all traffic to the 200,000+ sites they monitor came from people clicking on Facebook links. Only Google search and people entering a URL directly accounted for more website visits.
Facebook on its own drove more traffic than Twitter, Yahoo, Bing, StumbleUpon and new-kids-on-the-block Pinterest combined.
If you’re aiming to make money online then Facebook is the one website you really CAN’T afford to ignore.
In fact, MMR has just started our very own page too… see here: http://www.facebook.com/MoreMoneyReview
We’ll be sharing our marketing strategies with you along the way but in this article I’ve set out some ideas for making money from Facebook.
But first, for those who have yet to sample the delights of the world’s favourite social networking site, you can see a quick guide to get you up and running here:
http://www.moremoneyreview.com/how-to-set-up-a-facebook-account-14965.html
Once you have your account set up you need to then set up a Facebook Page
Now the normal Facebook Profile can certainly be used for marketing purposes, but they have one major drawback. They can be viewed only by people in your existing network, and are not normally visible to search engines.
So that’s no good for us as a marketing tool.
It means they are great for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues, but not quite so good for expanding your network beyond these people – which, of course, for marketing purposes you want to do.
Facebook has a solution for this, however, in the form of Facebook Pages. Pages are designed for businesses (including solo freelances) and brands to promote themselves.
Facebook Pages are free to set up and anyone on the Internet can see them. Unlike Profiles, Pages are visible to the search engines, so they will attract search traffic and help raise your profile online.
So if you have a business then you really need to be doing this.
There is one other very important difference between Facebook Profiles and Pages. Whereas you become a ‘friend’ of someone’s Profile, you ‘like’ a Page by clicking on a ‘like’ button.
Once someone has liked your Page, they will see all the updates posted to it in their newsfeed.
You can like the MMR facebook page here and see exactly what we are doing:
http://www.facebook.com/MoreMoneyReview
The Page owner will not, however, see the updates of all the people who like their Page – which may be a relief if you have a popular Page with thousands of fans!
As nice as it is knowing many MMR members, I don’t need to know everything about your life. So the Facebook Page is desgined perfectly to keep you in touch with your prospects or members..
Setting up a Page is quite straightforward, but you must have a Profile first (see link above to set one up). Once you do, scroll down to the bottom of your Facebook homepage and you should see the menu below. Click on ‘Create a Page’, as indicated.
Using Facebook As A Marketing Tool
Note that as Pages are intended for businesses, you will be asked which of six categories of business your Page should be allocated to.
If you’re unsure, I suggest choosing ‘Brand or Product’. You can always change this later if you wish.
After that, it’s just a matter of entering some information about your business/brand and uploading a suitable photograph or other image.
Your Page will then be created automatically by Facebook. Don’t forget to like it yourself, and invite all your Facebook friends to like it as well!
Once you have at least 25 people who like your Page, Facebook will let you choose a simplified, more memorable URL for it.
This is well worth doing, but choose carefully, as once you have done so, you won’t be able to change it.
One other top tip – don’t use the same name for your Page as your Profile, even if you believe that ‘my name is my brand’. Trust me, having a Profile and a Page with the same name causes endless confusion!
More Money Review is now on Facebook!
To show you how this works I’ve set up MMR’s own Facebook page.
When you click the like button you’ll get updates to your news feed on the latest reviews, trading and betting results as they are released.
Plus to celebrate the launch of our Facebook page we’ll be posting a link to a special free report on our Facebook Page next week. Make sure you “like” us on Facebook so you get this new report as soon as it’s released.
Check out More Money Review’s new Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/MoreMoneyReview
I think that’s quite enough for now. Make sure you have your Facebook profile and page set up and in the next part I’ll show you exactly how to make money from Facebook.
Category: General Advice