Facebook Marketing How-to Guide for Small Business
Facebook marketing tips, cautions, ideas and how-to advice for small businesses. Learn how to market and promote your business, products and services on Facebook along with some important cautions and realities of setting up and maintaining a Facebook marketing program for your small business.
When something changes on Facebook that's important for you to know about, we update this article.
Facebook has 800 million+ users. It's the second most popular website behind Google in terms of unique visitors. And while it started out as a social network for college students, it's now expanded far beyond that. Facebook users who are 26 to 64 years of age represent more than half of Facebook's users in the United States, according to InsideFacebook.com.
Facebook is like an online version of a coffee shop or bar. People go there to be entertained and to mix and mingle with people they know and people they want to meet. Some products and services are a natural fit to sell and promote on Facebook. Other products and services are much more difficult when it comes to grabbing someone's attention on Facebook. It's about the mindset or attitude of the person on Facebook. Most people are not in the mindset to think about certain types of products, services and companies when they are on Facebook. You can buy someone's attention by giving away something of value for free or making a great price-off discount. That's like buying everyone in a bar a round of drinks - it's expensive and is it really going to win you people who will become paying customers? Just like with buying drinks for strangers, you may get a lot of "likes" but not many long-time friends or business customers. Most of the large companies with huge Facebook followings have "bought" the "likes" by offering an entry to a sweepstakes or an amazing offer. They then have the ability for those people to see their posts.
MarketingZone How-to Guides on Facebook
- Facebook Pages for Business - How to set up a Facebook page to market your business. That's free.
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Facebook Marketing Mistakes
Get inspired!
Facebook Advertising
Facebook Marketing - What's New? What's Changed?
Lots of changes going on with Facebook that have implications for marketing yourself or your business on Facebook. As things change, we update this article. Here's the latest...
1. Facebook's new "Timeline" format became mandatory for all Facebook account holders as of April 30th. You'll want to be sure your company page is updated to support this format. Otherwise, you'll appear behind the times when your customers visit. Facebook provides an excellent microsite about the timeline: Timeline: A New Kind of Profile.
2. Facebook personal profile pages and business pages no longer appear in Google search results. The war is on between Google and Facebook now that Google has introduced and is promoting Google Plus.
3. Facebook has launched a new feature that allows people to control how often they get status updates/posts (messages) from their connections.
What that means to you is that your "fans" on your business and personal page can choose how often they want to hear from you.
4. People can now "subscribe" to read posts made by people they don't know.
If you see a subscribe button on someone's Facebook profile page, you can subscribe to get their public posts (messages). In this way, Facebook is now more "Twitter-like." However, there's one important difference. With Facebook when you "subscribe" to get posts (messages) you can control how many posts you want to receive (all; most; important only). With Twitter you get every post.
Excellent blog post by Facebook on how this works
4. Facebook is giving away $50 advertising credits to small businesses
Have you tried Facebook advertising? Facebook advertising is like buying a direct mail list. It’s easy to target exactly who you want to reach and to tailor your ad messages to be most relevant to specific types of prospective customers. Your ads need to be FUN and engaging on Facebook to work.
Relevant news about Facebook Advertising you may be interested in:
Facebook’s advertising revenue passed $1.6 billion in the first half of 2011 and is expected to grow during the second six months. Display ads sold at CPM (cost per thousand impressions) are up 60% and CPC (cost per click) revenue is up 30% according to article in Advertising Age.
5. Facebook has canceled their Groupon-like Facebook Deals program after just four months. There are something like 400 deal-a-day coupon sites/services (too many). If you want to offer a deal to customers or prospects on Facebook, you can do that through your company page by posting a status update (that's free) and you can also buy ads on Facebook if you want to reach more people.










