> BlogEveryone’s talking about it these days, just about everyone you talk to is using it for one reason or another – perhaps keeping in touch with their children overseas, keeping updated with what their friends are doing or using it for business, what am I talking about? Facebook.
Here we take a look at Facebook as a whole and then discuss why Facebook marketing should be considered as part of your overall marketing strategy.
A Brief History of Facebook
Back in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg co-created what initially started out as ‘Thefacebook’ while attending Harvard University. Initially it was a restricted membership site, where only students of Harvard College were allowed to register, but later opened to other schools and universities in Canada and the United States. As time progessed the platform slowly become available to anyone over the age of thirteen with a valid email address and was soon known as just ‘Facebook’.
In 2007 Microsoft made an announcement that it had purchased a share in Facebook, which included having rights to place international ads on the site. In the years to come Facebook employed staff and opened offices in twelve countries. The ownership and investment in the company increased.
Facebook continues to grow and its worth becomes more and more as the years go on.
What is Facebook?
In their own words, if you visit Facebook’s own page they describe themselves as “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Which I think sums it up nicely.
Facebook allows people, businesses and groups to have their own profile/page where they can share information, pictures and events and engage in conversations with their friends or ‘likes’.
As a user you can control who sees your information by a range of privacy settings. Which for personal profiles is useful, but perhaps not so if you want people to find your business page, so it pays to check your settings upon set up.
Facebook – The Basics
When people talk to you about Facebook, terms like ‘Wall’, ‘News Feed’, ‘Friend’ ‘Like’ and ‘Status Updates’ are likely to come into conversation. So here we look at the basics:
Friends – You can be friends with anyone that you like on Facebook, all it takes is the approval of a simple ‘friend request’ and then you become “friends”.
Likes – Likes have a couple of different meanings. Firstly they are like the business equivalent of a ‘friend’. If you ‘like’ a business page or group page for instance, you become one of their ‘likes’. Businesses don’t have to approve a ‘like’ as you do for a ‘friend’. Liking a page will show in your friends’ news feeds, so that they can see what you ‘like’ and therefore choose if they want to do the same.
Secondly, you can ‘like’ one of your friends posts, which is like giving them the ‘thumbs up’ for a comment they have made.
Status Updates – These are a ‘post’ that you make for your friends/likes to see.
Wall – This is where you can write aka “post” status updates and content to share with your friends/likes.
News Feed – This is the page that you arrive on when you login to Facebook. It will show a ‘feed’ of all your friends status updates, likes and comments that they write to their own friends.
Whilst all these things might sound odd to a new Facebook user, they do become second nature after a while.
Why Should I Consider Using Facebook For My Business?
All of the above sounds great for socialising with your personal friends, right? I can hear you asking why you would bother for your business. One of the main reasons, as with any Social Media Marketing, is to engage with your customers/clientele and listen to what they have to say.
If it wasn’t for our customers/clientele we wouldn’t have businesses, so it’s important that as a business we supply our customers/clientele with the best services and products that we can. The best way to do that is to find out what it is that they want from us and a way to find this out is via Facebook.
By creating a compelling business page you can attract your customers/clientele to ‘like’ it and therefore engage with you. You can also provide your business with a more ‘human’ feel. For instance if you used your Facebook page as your customer service contact and advertised this on your products and such like, your customers would know that you are dedicated to answering their queries – rather than ringing a pre-recorded phone number.
With Facebook marketing you can also leverage word-of-mouth. Just by getting new ‘likes’ this will show on these peoples ‘news feed’ which then shows to their friends. Curious friends then go through to your page to find out why their friends like your business so much, and from there you can gain more ‘likes’. The process carries on meaning that your business gets more and more exposed.
You can also use Facebook to get users to visit your site. For instance let’s say that you have just written a blog, if you go and post an intriguing message on your wall with the link to that blog, people can then visit that page on your website. If they find it useful they might ‘like’ it on your Facebook page, which gives you an indication of whether people found it useful and/or they might link to that blog from their own website, meaning that you have gained a backlink, which is great from a Search Engine marketing point of view.
In Summary
There a many more things that you can use Facebook for, but it’s important to firstly ensure that your Facebook page is well set up, offers enough well-written information about your business and more importantly, you are willing to spend the time on it (if this is one thing you don’t think that you have, take a look at my Overcoming the Fear of Social Media Marketing blog).
You might not consider Facebook marketing as the best option in social media for your particular business goals, but its’ worth finding out if your competitors have an active Facebook presence and then considering what you could do on Facebook to expand your business, get your brand name known and provide exceptional customer service.
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