Make Facebook Work for You

Facebook offers a variety of ways to promote and market your business, and many are surprisingly simple. Here are a few suggestions from Techipedia:

Step 1. Create a FAN PAGE, not a PROFILE PAGE

For a business, a fan page is certainly the way to go. Do not use a personal profile page to represent your business, nor a Facebook “Group.”

They are outdated (from Facebook’s early days) and do not support Facebook Markup Language (FBML) or Facebook Apps, so they are not as interactive and thus do not make as strong of an impact.

Step 2. Utilize Facebook Markup Language (FBML)

You’ll need to install the “Static FBML” app and learn the appropriate language (similar to HTML) but it’s a fairly simple process to learn and allows you to personalize your content and tabs and make it more user-friendly to followers. Here’s how a few pages have utilized it to create unique tabs:

Step 3. Offer exclusive deals

People need to have a reason to tell the world they “like” you.

How do I know if there’s ROI in Facebook? One way is to see is by giving exclusive deals to Facebook fans. You can elect to do this one of two ways. You can offer deals exclusively to Facebook followers only. Don’t cross promote to Twitter (offer a different incentive on Twitter). Don’t post it on your blog. Don’t share it on your email newsletter. This is a good way of checking specifically if your Facebook efforts are working when you see that the Facebook coupon codes have been redeemed.

Use a Facebook app to push these promotions. Here’s how Baskin Robbins is addressing it:

People interact with brands online because they want deals. Try to offer some every so often.

Step 4. Engage your community

The more you post, the more visible you’ll be in your fans newsfeed. Asking questions gets you a great deal of attention and so does posting photos. Especially when you invite your fans to do the same!

Engagement is not limited to wall posts. Post photos of your service and product offerings and invite your fans to do the same. A tremendously wonderful execution of this is on Graco’s photos tab.

All of these suggestions will put you well on your way to creating a Facebook fanbase that works as vital word-of-mouth advertising and shows you what does and does not work online to bring in customers.