In a survey conducted among undergraduates in the US, Facebook was found to be the second most popular application only after the iPod. Today, Facebook.com is one of the most popular networking sites for over 175 million of the world's college population, business people and company employees. Therefore, it has emerged as the ultimate marketing tool.
Members of Facebook share photo albums, home videos and applications with their friends and colleagues; send instant messages, promote their activities, chat, play asynchronous games like chess and scrabble, and announce events, send out invites and join various groups and networks. Here are some ultimate tools from Facebook for the online marketer.
1. Profile: This is the starting point for your marketing efforts. You must create an online image of yourself that expresses your passion for your brand. Use this opportunity fully to leverage the power of Facebook because the profile page is the most frequently browsed page of your online presence. Create a real life story around your product or service, how you started and how your business has grown and so on.
2. Photos: This is an application which allows you to upload an unlimited number of photos and share them with your friends and other people in your networks. You can use this feature to display images of your products and brands and thus promote them. You can also share photos of meets, conferences, and important people who have visited your product launches.
3. Marketplace: You can post classified advertisements for people in your network. There is no charge for this. However, if you want the ads to be seen by people outside your network then there is a small charge of $1 per ad per network. Ensure that you do not spam the system with multiple insertions.
4. Social Ads: If you have some money to spend, you can pay for user clicks or some specified user action. This is a highly effective way of generating leads for your products since you can target your ads to specific demographics like age range, location, education level, relationship status and workplaces. There is also a real time facility to see the effect of your ads and to tweak your budget accordingly.
5. Facebook also offers integrated marketing capabilities for your campaigns for special members. A dedicated professional will help tune your campaign for identified target audience which goes way beyond the reach of social ads.
Use these tips and also explore other options available on Facebook for result-oriented marketing campaigns. This can turn out to be the one good thing that you have been looking for to generate leads or to build your brand.
Tags: advertisements, Advertising, attraction marketing, business, facebook, facebook marketing, marketing, online marketing, polls, social networking
