WSI Internet Franchise Blog

With over 350 million users and more traffic in the UK than Google last month, Facebook is a social media site that cannot be ignored. Remembering that social media is not the place to blatantly and endlessly pitch your product or service otherwise you will probably be ignored, what you need to do is to build relationships and enter a conversation with your prospects. There are a number of ways to do this but you need to be seen to be genuine and helpful so that people will become interested in what your products or services are all about.

• You can chat with them to find out what help they require
• You can post helpful links or information that solve a problem
• You can create valuable content addressing the needs of other users
• The things you share should not be the details of your product or service you need to share helpful information that get others interested enough to ask how you do that.

Some of the features on Facebook that you can use include:

Pages

Facebook Pages are the place to promote your business. Facebook describes pages as “a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.” This is the place to write about your business and not on your personal profile; people can then become a Fan of your page and when they do this they let their friends know that they have become a Fan of your page via their News Feed. This all helps to get the word out about your business and if you have helpful information on that page everyone will want to visit and return to it.

Events

This is the place to tell everyone about any events you are organizing,

• A webinar conducted online which anyone in the world can join.
• A seminar you are running locally which can be promoted.
• A product or service launch event can be marketed using this method and this is a great way to gain added attention.

The best thing about creating an event on Facebook is that it can go viral and attract lots of attention.

Advertising

You can create paid ads in a very similar manner to on Google Adwords and pay per click (PPC) or impression (CPM). You can target your ads to a certain geographical location but in addition you can attach them to certain social actions. For example if you are a photographer and want to promote your business to people who are getting married, you can set your ads to show to females between 24 and 30 whose relationship status shows them to be engaged.

As long as you have established your social networking goals and have a strategy in place to accomplish them, Facebook is certainly a place that cannot be ignored. It is not the right place for every business to target but there are many useful digital marketing tools there that can get great results if used correctly.

Read more about how a WSI Digital Marketing Consultant can help you build a customized social media strategy for your business.