There are a large amount of companies using Facebook to market and achieving great success doing it.
How? Facebook now has around 800 million users around the world, producing approximately 770 billion page views each month. On average Facebook users visit the site about 40 times per month, spending on average 23 minutes on each visit.
This equates to each user spending an average of 15 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook in one month. Altogether, users spend a massive 12.4 billion hours on Facebook in a month. That’s 1,415,525 years. That’s a lot of time for users to view your company page. And this was just for the Facebook website. It doesn’t include the highly popular Facebook mobile apps, which are used by 200+ million of Facebook’s users.
Over last few years the number of Facebook users between the ages of 35 and 44 increased by more than half, users among the ages 45-54 grew by 47% and more than half of the Facebook users are out of college. Obviously Facebook is no longer for just college students. What can you gain from using Facebook as a marketing tool? The answer is easy; you can use Facebook to gain new clients, stay in touch with current clients and promote new products and sales offers. You can also use it to create PR that is specific about your business and targeted to your customer demographic.
What is the best way to use Facebook as a marketing medium? Facebook offers you many tools which can be used to market your business, promote your goods or services and keep your existing customers up to date on your company news, special offers, etc.
One of the things you should look at is Facebook Pages. You can use Facebook Pages to give your business their own profile on Facebook, and the best part? It’s free! These pages give your business an identity on Facebook which helps build and strengthen your brand. Current customers, and if done well, potential customers can become fans of your page and this allows them to follow you and receive any updates that you post to your page.
The best thing about marketing using Facebook Pages is that whenever someone becomes a fan of your page all of their friends see that they have become a “fan”. This often attracts other followers which of course builds your popularity.
You should use your Facebook Page not only to share your company information, but you can also use it to post photos, videos, applications and messages. Any activity that you perform on your Facebook Page is then broadcast into the mini-feeds of your followers. This is great for keeping your customers informed but also for building a better business/client relationship as the customer feels more involved with the business.
When creating your Facebook Page, there are certain things you will need to think about. You will be given a choice of three options when you start out. You will be asked whether your page is about:
- A Local Business
- An Artist, Band or a Public Figure
- A Brand or a Product
This can sometimes be tricky as many companies cover more than one of these choices. Each of these will allow you to complete your “basic information”, “detailed information” or “contact information.” Each option will provide you with a page that enables you to supply different ways of showing your information.You need to remember that you cannot edit your page type after you have selected it, and that the page type that you select will categorize your page with other like pages in that group; this is why you need to make sure you choose the category to be displayed in. Your Facebook Page, when done correctly can be instrumental in bringing in new customers as well as helping you to maintain and build upon current customer relationships.
Facebook Groups, are similar to Facebook Pages, the main difference being that they are built around a group of people rather than your business or your brand. You must be a member of Facebook to create a Facebook Group. To create a group you have to be logged into Facebook, bear in mind that a page cannot run a group so you will have to set up a suitable administrator account to run the group. The Groups link can be found in the main menu on the left hand side of the page. You can use Facebook Groups to create awareness, but they do not have the feature that allows users to become fans, they only become members. The downfall of this is it will not share as much information with friends of “group” members as they interact with the group. However groups are good for promoting your industry so this would be a good choice for anyone trying to promote a less well known vertical.
Remember though, your page can potentially be exposed to millions of users so transparency and honesty should be your buzz words.
On the whole Facebook has proven to be a valuable marketing medium for many companies and if used correctly could benefit many more, from brand building to spreading awareness of lesser known industries but the main question you should be asking yourself is “What have I got to lose?”
