Facebook As Your Marketing Tools

If you are making use of Facebook to market your small business, without working with the Facebook pay per click advertising system, then that you are in for fairly a problem. In this article I will introduce you towards the problem and I will tell you what I believe you should do once it comes to making use of Facebook to advertise your business enterprise for no cost.

You have your friends from the offline world and you've got the people involved in your home business, and once it comes to Facebook, they are all regarded as as your buddies. The problem is that a lot of people, me included, do not need to mix buddies and enterprise. I do not need to have my (offline) pals to see updates of my marketing and advertising stuff, I don't will need them to see all kinds of images and links to advertising and marketing stuff, I will need them to see the results from the Things I Like To Do Naked Quiz (not certain if there is such a quiz, yet I believe you find my point). The exact same goes for my business enterprise partners and my buyers. I don't will need them to see the outcomes from the "Things I Like To Do Naked Quiz", I need them only to see marketing related stuff.

If you would including to mix enterprise with pleasure when it comes to Facebook, you can nearly guarantee that your enterprise partners and your customers is usually instead confused. Should they see all of the stuff that goes on between you and your pals? Do you think that this will advantage your enterprise?

You join Facebook using your actual name, quite a few people do that, and in the event you are working with your real name at Facebook, you will "automatically" develop a great deal of friends. And once it comes to your business enterprise, you will need to make use of Facebook to communicate with your company partners and your buyers at the same time.

The problem of using Facebook to market your company came to my mind a number of months right after joining the community. Most individuals join Facebook simply because they need to have to communicate with their pals, they require to get old pals, and possibly obtain a number of new buddies. It's the communication between individuals that appears to be what it truly is all around, and for this, Facebook is close to perfect.

Chat this is a pretty new application where you are able to communicate along with your Facebook buddies in real-time. You can chose who to communicate with, and the people chatting is usually the only ones that will see the communication.

Facebook can be a marketing nightmare, nevertheless it can as well be a blessing. You know that close to everybody is really a member, and that it may be a really helpful way of communication. Communicate with your offline pals and your home business partners and shoppers, then again remember, by no means mix them and remain focused.

Use only communication applications that your offline friends will not see. Target your company partners and your customers along with your communication, and do the other way around with your offline friends.

Using Facebook Fan Pages to Capture Contact Information

The use of capture or squeeze pages for viral list building and lead generation is familiar to a great number of people who browse the web typically, however the use of a Facebook fan page (or business page) to capture visitor information is basically beginning to "catch on." The use of social media in general has taken off at a staggering rate and has ushered in social marketing with it. A Facebook fan page, when made use of appropriately, is an critical portion and gives a number of fabulous benefits over standard capture pages for list-developing and lead generation. With Facebook exploding to right now nicely more than 750,000,000 people, the viral energy to expand your traffic plenty of times more than, far better conversion along with the highest accuracy probable makes a Facebook capture page the much better option to regular capture pages.  

Why Build a List? 
The many obvious answer as to why you'd construct a list would be to sell a person some thing, nevertheless the intelligent marketers aren't necessarily looking for just the immediate, one-time sale. They are seeking to produce a massive after to which they are able to give items and services more than an ongoing period of time, so it can be critical that they nurture and cultivate the list by consistently providing value - a "win-win" circumstance for both parties. A great capture page gives some kind of incentive in exchange for visitors typing their name and email into a form, actually "opting in" and giving permission to get emails or even to be contacted by telephone. Obviously, the incentive wants to be something of value in order to draw in the appropriate people, nevertheless it have to have not be some thing of high economic value. In truth, in loads of instances the incentive is quickly providing on the net information and/or training and is either delivered by means of e-mail, including an "e-book," for example, or in plenty of situations offering a link to a internet site with videos and links to other valuable resources. This kind of lead-capture technique calls for a graphic-wealthy supply page with the capability to capture the information after which pass the visitor on into the destination page, where the sale, or "conversion" procedure continues. The procedure of converting a visitor to a paying customer generally takes time - such as a courtship where you create trust over time and engage in an ongoing dialogue, all though offering ongoing value.  

The Importance of a Capture Page on Facebook 

So if the people are on Facebook, then why not just focus your visitors-creating efforts on becoming the attention of Facebook users after which driving them to your present capture page sites? Why have a capture page inside Facebook? Well, becoming active on Facebook is, for most users, an enjoyable activity exactly where they're able to interact with buddies, take a look at what's going on in their social circles, join in discussions, browse through photo galleries, look for lost buddies, and so on., and normally the last factor they need to have to do is click on some thing that takes them outside of Facebook. When something of interest floats by them (social advertising and marketing), they are less likely to check it out if it factors to a site that's external to Facebook. As soon as they click on something which begins redirecting them to an external internet site, they'll effortlessly close it before it even finishes loading. Conversely, they're even more most likely to check it out if it keeps them within Facebook. The statistics for Facebook advertising and marketing bear this out, as conversions are a lot greater if the landing page for an ad is inside Facebook. It at the same time fits the sales procedure nicely, permitting marketers to make purchasing interest in stages, ultimately becoming them towards the point exactly where they are willing to go towards the transactional web site. Facebook also presents discounted advertising and marketing rates of as much as 30% for channeling ad site visitors directly to a page inside Facebook, as opposed to moving them to an outside web-site.

Facebook Is The NEW Google

The Google "Gold Rush" ended when thousands of innocent marketers were slapped and made hand shy by Google's unreasonable quality scores. But the Facebook "Fan Page Rush" is just getting started! And Facebook is now the most-viewed site in the United States! Tap into the 500 Million rabid Facebook users and get unlimited traffic with these step-by-step video tutorials! The launch price ends in a couple days. So go check it out right now. All the best!


Click here to check out Facebook Fan Page Traffic System

Facebook Is The Most Popular Mobile Social Network

According to the latest State of the Mobile Web report by Opera, Facebook is now the most popular mobile social network. Twitter was the other big winner in 2009 and saw its usage surge by 2800%. All the listed Social Networking sites, other than Friendster, experienced significant growth in 2009. The other interesting data to emerge from Opera’s analysis is the overwhelming dominance of Nokia in South-East Asia. In Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines and India each of the top 10 mobile phones were manufactured by Nokia.

Reply to Facebook Wall Post via E-Mail

If you use Facebook, now you can reply to your wall posts and update your status by email. No need to login to your Facebook account. To use this feature, make sure that your Facebook notification settings are turned on. The feature will only work when replying to e-mail alerts regarding status updates and comments left on photos, wall posts, and videos.



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The Top Facebook Status Trends for 2009

The top most discussed topics of 2009 has been released by Facebook. It is taken based on daily status updates by Facebook members. To reach its conclusions, Facebook looked at how many times a given one- to four-word phrase was used in Facebook status updates, and then computed the rate at which each phrase was used in 2009 compared to 2008. The number one trend was Facebook applications, specifically the discussion of FarmVille in status updates. Farmville became the most talked-about application in status updates and now boasts over 72 million monthly active users. To be frankly, this games really addicted and I'm the one of the users.



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Facebook New Privacy Settings

Recently Facebook rolled out their new privacy settings. With the adjustment came an announcement that all users were forced to see, warning them that poor privacy setting management can come at a harsh price. The new privacy controls include some great changes, and some not-so-great changes. The major change involves friend lists on user profiles. Now no one can see a person's friend list unless that person designates it as viewable content. For more information on Facebook's privacy changes go to Facebook's privacy post.

Facebook + Paypal WishList = Money!

Do you want to earn up to $100 from PayPal by using your Facebook account? Yes you can with PayPal WishList. For your info Paypal is having a little giveaway and they will award their members if they added the application to their Facebook profile. All you have to do is log in and then enter your paypal email address then choose your wish list and then share it via Facebook. The more you share the more you earn. Anyone may use this application; however, only PayPal account holders registered in India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore or Vietnam will be eligible to earn cash back. This promotion is valid until December 31st 2009 or until funds last. So click here to add the application to your Facebook profile now.



*You need a PayPal account to join. Sign up here if you don't have one. It's free!

Facebook Testing "Facebook Lite"?

There are too many sources reporting Facebook is testing "Facebook Lite" and number of Facebook users have received beta invitations to a 'lite' version of the popular social networking service recently. So what is Facebook Lite? In a nut shell it's very similar to Twitter. You can see your status updates and your friends' updates. There is a left-hand navigation with four main categories: Wall, Info, Friends, and Photos and Videos. It does little more than that. The "Lite" version is expected to use smaller pictures and lower-resolution videos in order to speed up downloads of the page. It is also aimed at mobile phones, where data downloads are slower than broadband - but which are pervasive in Asia, its fastest-growing region for users.

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Starbucks Gives Away Free Ice Cream Via Facebook

Starbucks is promoting its launch of branded ice cream by giving away hundreds of free pints to Facebook users through a new Facebook app called, imaginatively, "Share a Pint of New Starbucks Ice Cream." The gifting application allows users to send friends (or themselves) a coupon for free ice cream. Free pints and discount coupons are available through July 19. Up to 20,000 free coupons are available each day, and will be given out in batches of roughly 800 each hour.

Facebook Payments Platform?

Facebook has just launched the first live integration of its payment service for applications, a first step toward what could become a major new source of revenue for the company. The payment system, called “Pay with Facebook” to consumers, is now live in fbFund-winning application GroupCard. Inside the app, users are able to purchase premium items for anywhere from $3 to $25, which can then paid for with any major credit card or Facebook credits. Facebook credits are the first payment option listed in the user interface. I think, the potential for such a system is huge. If Facebook has its way, this thing could eventually be used around the web and compete with things like PayPal and Google Checkout.

Facebook Phishing Attack!

Recently, Facebook users have been hit with an e-mail phishing attack that attempts to obtain their passwords to the social networking site. The new attack sends sends an email message with subject "Hello" to the victim with body text asking to visit an obscure URL with .at domain name - areps.at , kirgo.at and so on. Do not visit those links!

When users click on the link, they are brought to a fraudulent Facebook page that requests their account information and then routes them to their own Facebook page as it captures the login data. In some cases, the attackers use the login data to immediately change the users' passwords, effectively locking them out of their accounts.

Facebook and other social networking sites, including MySpace and Twitter, have had problems previously with phishing. But Facebook, the largest of such sites, with more than 200 million users, seems to have been more of a target for the phishing attempts in recent weeks.

So, if you want to stay secure, visit Facebook Security page and follow the solutions offered. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity!

Torrent Sharing Comes to Facebook??

I think everybody knows that Facebook is the world’s largest social network today, with over 150 to 200 million people signed up already. It’s one of the best ways to share links, blog posts, and content. You know what, soon, The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s most popular websites for file sharing and torrents, allows you to share links to download these files right from your Facebook profile. Click here for more info.

Facebook Fifth Birthday

Today is a Facebook fifth birthday. In the battle for online friends, Facebook is now the world leader FYI, Facebook is giving its 150 million users a mystery virtual gift to celebrate its fifth birthday. Founder Mark Zuckerberg post on Facebook blog:

"To express our appreciation, we've created a "Thank You" gift, which will be available tomorrow in the Facebook Gift Shop for you to to give freely to others. In the spirit of celebrating connections between people, we encourage you to use this gift to give thanks to your friends, colleagues and family members with whom you are connected on Facebook.

Facebook On Fire!

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on his blog that the social network's registered user base has hits 150 million. Zuckerberg pointing that if Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria. It will be interesting to see how long the company can sustain this impressive growth rate. Brilliant achievement!

Promoting Your Business On Facebook

by: Simon Dance

Of course the colossal media attention that Facebook has received - and it’s absurd valuations - coupled with the increasing number of member has certainly been a pull for all sorts of businesses to harness the platform, but the question is? How are they? And how are you - and your business - harnessing Facebook pages?

Have you just reactively just thrown up a Facebook profile without really thinking strategically about what you really want to gain from it? And are you aimlessly collecting friends with no real clue as to how to get these members to your website?

The Facebook business pages go in some way to organise the range of business that currently have traditional profiles by offering an easy to manage template where business owners can include their address, logo and contact details – and best of all they’re free and easy to set up.

These pages are, in my opinion, far sleeker than the “teenage” bedroom walls of traditional pages – with the added difference that “Friends” are in fact “Fans” who are available to post reviews, comments, photos and comments about the company.

But benefiting from Facebook pages is not about just throwing a profile up, so before glancing over the 'how to' guide, ask yourself, "why do I need a Facebook page?" Is it for increased visibility? And if so, how do you propose to attract and keep these customers? Or is the objective to be more customer-centric by listening to their recommendations and criticisms in order to add value to your business? And if so, do you have the resource to manage this strategy effectively?

Whilst any tentative approach into arenas like Facebook are of course likely to allow one to learn from their mistakes, something has to be said for missing an opportunity to be great, to capture the attention of your customers once and have them be ‘fans’ for eternity.

The following five steps explain how to get started:

1. Visit Facebook.com and click on the “Create a page” button

2. You’ll then be presented with a range of categories including “Local”, “Business / Product” or “Artist, Band, or Public Figure”. Pick the category applicable for your business.

3. On this same page, either the name of your business, product or artist name and click the “Create Page” button.

4. At this stage, you’ll be presented with a template which you’ll need to populate with your business information. A short description, web address, contact details and a company logo is a good place to start, which you can include by clicking on the “Add Information” link at the top of the page.

5. Once you are happy with how your page is looking, click back to the ‘Add Information’ page and click on the “Publish this page” link. (You page will not be accessible by the Facebook community until you do this).

Now, you’ve got your basic Facebook page you’re a third of the way there… and whilst in this article I won’t discuss promoting your profile or recruiting friends I will instead brainstorm a few ideas as to how you can add value to your page by encouraging users or ‘prospective’ fans to interact with you and your business – this is, after all, “Social” media.

Let’s say, for instance, that my client is a local produce company that sells via its central Brighton retail premises in addition to having concessions in a number of farm shops and cafes. Their online sales are increasing steadily, particularly its hampers at Christmas time, however with competition from the major supermarkets they really want to step up they ‘local’ exposure online. They known their produce is far superior than that of their competitors, but they just need an avenue to communicate this to both their existing and prospective customers.

They’ve already ventured into Facebook (as just one tool in their arsenal) but this has had limited success, they now want to know how they can ‘use’ their Facebook page to increase awareness and ultimately drive traffic into the shop and the website. My advice would include:

Add value to your page:

Adding ‘value’ or ‘usefulness’ to your page is essential in order to increase the time spent on your page and ensure your ‘Facebook fans’ return to it. A worst case scenario would be that prospective users, on their first visit to your Facebook profile merely decide to become a fan without ever actually engaging.

Think about consumption.

The Produce Shop could include extensive details of where their retail shop is located, including a map and a link to a section of their website where they’ve highlighted the nearest train and bus station and the best place to park.

They could go further to include their opening times, their telephone number and web address, details of new products that have come into the shop this week, special offers, local events they recommend, short interviews with local producers and farmers, an up to date news feed of what’s happening in Sussex and the regular posting of photos both in the shop, at local farms, at food fares and school fates.

This added value needn’t all be ‘one way’ either.

Allow and Encourage Participation:

Whilst we are aware of the large collection of users and vast number of groups within Facebook it more difficult to predict how users will interact with these groups, but it’s safe to say that with any communicative means, interaction and participation is likely to merit the more valuable response.

The Produce Shop could ask users to submit their own images of what “Local” means to them, or perhaps photographs of particular meals they have cooked with local produce including the recipe. This idea could be expanded by staging a “Facebook” competition, to win, say a hamper, whereby users are encouraged to submit photographs and ‘get involved’.

Posting ‘thought’ provoking points for discussion such as “Is Tesco right to compete on price with battery Chickens?” will encourage users to post their feelings within your profile as well as check back for follow up comments.

In this way, the ‘fans’ (of your brand, product or service) become an active community.

Post a ‘Facebook’ event:

There is nothing like a good wine and cheese evening, but how about extending this and having a late night opening of the shop and offering customers a tasting session of a range of local cheeses and wines. The Produce Shop could post a ‘Facebook’ event about this evening, which would then be shared to all of the group’s members, who might in turn ‘accept’ or ‘decline’ their invitation. The beauty of this feature is that their decision will be posted within their ‘mini feed’ (a sort of list of what they have been doing on Facebook – viewable by their friends) which feature promotes the event.

Photographs of the evening (which could be doctored with a ‘Produce Shop’ logo could then be posted on the Product Shops Facebook page allowing users to tag themselves. Again, this is excellent for branding, and using free tool to your advantage.

Start a Facebook group:

Facebook allows members to start and join groups, ranging from all sorts of subjects and the produce shop could start a group, such as “I vow to Keep it Local” or “I love Sussex Produce” which might feature a lengthy description and photos on the excellent range of produce available within the region, where to buy it from and why it’s important to think locally. The Produce Shop might wish to team up with other retailers, cafes and shops who can all promote this Facebook group, which might also venture offline as well as they all campaign for local product, whilst also championing their businesses.

But with any foray into social media you have to be prepared to listen to your customers, who might have both good and bad things to say about your business, your staff and/ or your products.

Don’t just bury your head in the sand or delete any negative comments; instead use this to your advantage.

If a user was complaining –at length- that their Christmas hamper didn’t turn up until the New Year as a result of an administration error then this is an idea opportunity to post a response asking for them to contact you, or perhaps offer your apologies and promise to send them a gift voucher or a complimentary bottle of Sussex wine.

Demonstrate that you care about your customers; you are prepared to listen and make the necessary amendments to ensure complaints are minimised by tackling the root of the problem. If you have failings within your business, then you can guarantee your customers will point them out, but by being seen to listen to your customers, the perception of your brand will be heightened, over competitors who are busy burying their heads in the sand.

In conclusion Facebook pages can:

- Heighten Brand Awareness
- Create Brand Evangelists
- Provide Valuable Customer Feedback
- Widen the potential pool of prospective customers
- Increase Sales (offline and online)

It is just about taking that first step, that first foray into social media and engaging with users…… your efforts WILL be reciprocated.