Facebook for Social Media Marketing

Facebook now boasts over 500 million users, and so it’s easy to understand why over the last few years businesses have been setting up corporate fan pages and using the platform to promote new products and services. With so many active members sharing their thoughts and feelings online Facebook is basically priceless for brands and social media marketing. So how do you successfully tap into all these people and best use the information they offer up everyday in order to promote your brand?

On the social network, what companies would consider consumers are actually friends, it is the platform for connecting with friends and sharing stuff between your friendship groups. Corporations need to reflect this attitude with their fan pages, making them accessible, fun and easy to navigate. Implementing a splash page is a good way to do this, with eye catching graphics that welcome the user or friend to the companies fan page and set the tone for the brand.

Since Facebook’s decision to prompt users to engage with groups and fan pages via the ‘like’ button, companies can build customer relationships very quickly with the simple one motion of clicking the ‘like’ button. On a platform like Facebook companies can interact with people on an individual basis, they can also engage with groups of people and share information with multiple individuals but all at the same time.

The online community to which Facebook plays host is now very well established with millions of fresh conversations and new relationships going on everyday, so by setting themselves up companies can be found by this thriving digital neighbourhood. However it’s not enough to just create a corporate fan page and wait for the users to discover your brand. Companies should research what their competitors do to engage with a relevant customer base, what groups to join, where relevant conversations are taking place and about what. Listening to these can help a brand understand what its core consumers want from products and services.

As well as listening brands need to be pro-active. They can develop micro communities within Facebook that are centred around a specific theme, product or service. Then all the activity within this micro-community is particular and very focussed, making the information highly useful for the company. They can direct conversation towards issues or topics they need to collect data for, this can inform their marketing campaign later on and make it far more successful then it would have been previously.