4 Steps to Get Your Company Started on Facebook
Facebook is currently the second largest website in the world, with over 300 million active users. Over 50% of these users log in to Facebook every day. It makes sense that marketing on Facebook has become a go-to tactic for any company adopting social media. But before you jump in, it’s important to have a plan.
Step 1: Identify Your Goals
Why are you marketing on Facebook? What do you hope to achieve? Managing a Facebook Page can require serious time and effort, so make sure you have your objectives aligned at the outset.
Your goals should be specific. Your goals should revolve around engagement and interaction with your existing and potential customers. Your goals on Facebook should be to enhance your customer service or sales process, not just serve as a branding tool.
Step 2: Create Your Facebook Page
The basic component to marketing on Facebook is your Page. Your Page is essentially your brand’s profile on Facebook. Over 10 million users become fans of Pages every day. A Page can be anything. There are Pages for brands, celebrities and even random things like “Laughing When Someone Falls.” Yes, that’s an actual Facebook Page and it has over 2,000,000 fans.
Facebook Pages are easy to set up and even if you don’t plan on doing any serious marketing on Facebook, you should set up a Page for your brand to ensure that no one else does. However, if this is all you do, don’t expect much.
Facebook Pages are tied to the the events stream, which means that when users become a fan of your Page, their friends will see this in their news feed. With your Page, you can also organize events for fans, send messages and updates, add photos, videos, hold contests, conduct surveys, utilize applications and depending on your settings, users can post content to your Page.
Step 3: Advertise Your Page on Facebook
Once you have a Page, you’ll want to promote your page and attract new fans. Within Facebook, this can be done on their advertising platform. Facebook advertising has had some mixed reviews. From personal experience, I can tell you that advertising on Facebook is very different from other forms of online advertising. Normally, when advertising via paid search, you bid on keywords that indicate intent. The person who searches for “digital cameras”, for example, is most likely in the mindset to research or purchase a digital camera. This isn’t the case on Facebook. On Facebook, you advertise to users that are not in the mindset to be advertised to. People are on Facebook to see what their friends are doing, update their status or stalk people they went to high school with. They aren’t there to become a fan of your Page or brand.
To make advertising work, you need to do a significant amount of testing. Click-through-rate (CTR) is typically VERY low. Impressions are usually very high, however, and cost per million clicks (CPM) is very low, depending on the number of people you are targeting. Recently, Facebook has allowed advertisers to include a “Become a Fan” option with your ad, allowing users to become a fan of your Page without actually visiting your page. This could potentially address the low click-through-rate issue. Keep in mind that Facebook users are definitely not interested in leaving Facebook. If you’re intention is to get users to click on your ad, don’t expect them to click on an ad that will take them AWAY from Facebook. The goal of the ad should be either branding or to encourage users to become a fan of your brand. And I can’t emphasize this enough–test, test, test! Run multiple ads and variations of ads targeting different demographics. Also, ads grow stale very quickly so change them regularly.
A big advantage to Facebook advertising is that it offers some ridiculous hyper-targeting. You can target people by location, age, sex, education level, etc. You can even target users who already Fans and those that aren’t. This can give you some very useful insights about your target market. It is also incredibly useful for local marketing.
Step 4: Create Unique and Compelling Content
There are over 600,000 Pages on Facebook. Why should people become a fan of your page? Users are beginning to suffer from brand fatigue, so you really need to offer them a compelling reason to become a fan. Your Page has to be unique and you should offer fans something exclusive that they can only get on Facebook. One pretty common method of offering fans something exclusive and also promoting your Page is a Facebook contest for fans only. However, after this contest you should continue to offer Fans regular and compelling content to keep them engaged. Don’t just use Facebook as a platform to update your fans with information they can already find on your website.
Facebook offers some great marketing and branding opportunities. It’s very easy to get started on Facebook but it’s difficult to succeed. Make sure you take the time to plan and do it right!
