10 Tips for Marketing Your Business through Your Facebook Profile

The best way to market your business on Facebook is through a Facebook Page dedicated to that business. However, your personal Facebook Profile presents some marketing opportunities of its own. First and foremost, using your personal profile starts with personal relationships in building business relationships.

Let your friends know about your business. Make posts that specifically focus on the business. You can put a lot of information in one post, but it would be more effective to go through a number of posts, spread out over time, with each having a tidbit of information. The multiple posts increase the chances that any particular friend will see the post.
When friends share your posts about your business and their friends Like or Comment on them, consider sending Friend Requests to those new contacts. If they accept your Friend Request, you have new friends that will be seeing your posts regularly.
Use your ability to select whether each post can be seen by only Friends or by the Public to expand your ability to use your personal profile to interact with the Public.
You should also Allow Follows. When you Allow Follows to your personal profile, you don’t have to accept individuals as Friends to for them to see all of your public updates. You also won’t have your news feed cluttered with the updates of all of your followers.
Even personal posts can connect to your business. Your business is a major part of your life, so it is natural that some of your personal posts will involve things that are happening in your business. Keep those posts personal for your friends, but don’t overlook the opportunities to promote your business subtly at the same time.
Don’t hesitate to create posts to your personal profile that are solely ads for your business. This is an effective place to do that, because your friends already trust you. You have to build that trust in new contacts. Keep it in balance, though. Even your friends will lose interest in your Facebook posts if they are about nothing but your business.
Whatever the nature of post, if there is any connection to your business, include business contact info or a link to your website.
Always work to find ways to include a “Call to Action.” Whatever you are doing to promote your business on Facebook, asking the reader to take some action that will strengthen their connection to your business is essential. Some possibilities are links to take them to your website or Facebook Page, or to sign up for your mailing list to receive an informative report or other information. Any response to a Call to Action gives you more information about the prospect and presents an additional opportunity to make them a customer.
Use images intensively. A company logo, a photo of your place of business, or a photo of employees involved in some public service activity – any image like this draws more attention and gets more responses than text alone. Include text with, or even within, the image to further enhance its ability to create interest.
Any professional certification or award is a subject of personal pride, but don’t overlook it as an opportunity to promote your business.

In marketing your business through Facebook, you have an entire suite of tools available. Don’t overlook the opportunities presented by your personal profile.

10 Tips for Marketing Your Business with Facebook Advertising

Your company needs more customers, so you are examining marketing options. Advertising on Facebook is one option that you do not want to overlook. Facebook advertising is extraordinary in offering the ability to select a particular target audience, monitor the effectiveness of your ads, and modify the ads to adjust to responses.

To get maximum results from Facebook Advertising, it just takes a few key steps.

Begin With a Clear Goal. Two of the most common goals would be to generate sales directly from the ad or to increase awareness of your business while building a contact list for future marketing efforts. Everything about your ad should be constructed with your primary goal in mind.
Choose the Geographic Area. Does your business only serve your local area? Do you sell products that can easily be shipped anywhere in the world? For either of these cases or anything in between, you can tailor the regions where your ads will appear to match your needs.
Customize Your Ad for The Demographic You Wish to Reach. Because of the information Facebook collects about its users, you can define the advertisement’s target market based on age, gender, location, interests, or several other criteria. Combining those criteria allows you to be specific when you construct your ad for that target.
Direct Your Ad to Existing Contacts. Upload a customer or contact email list. Any of the people on that list that are also Facebook members will receive your ad.
Set Your Budget. You can choose to run ads continuously or for a particular period, and you can select how much you are willing to pay. Budgets are set as a maximum daily expenditure or total expenditure over the duration of the campaign.
Use Images. Images receive far more interest and generate higher response rates than text-only ads. Consider creating multiple ads with different images to examine their relative effectiveness.
Use Facebook Ad Manager. Ad Manager accumulates metrics on responses to your ads and presents them in comparison to goals established when the campaign was initiated. Using the information available, you can alter the campaign, changing the budget or target market or even completely re-creating the ad. A big plus – Facebook Ad Manager is available as a smartphone app.
Use Conversion Tracking. With Conversion Tracking, you place JavaScript code on your website that tracks visitors’ actions. That JavaScript sends info to Facebook, where it is compared with their record of prospects that looked at or clicked on your ad. Among other things, you can determine how many people viewed your website or made a purchase after seeing your Facebook ad.
Boost your posts. Boosting a post is a different type of advertising. Boosting a post causes it to appear higher in the News Feed of the ad recipients, thus raising the likelihood that it will be seen. You can have any post boosted, increasing its exposure.
Always include a Call to Action. Salespeople know the axiom “Always ask for the sale.” Professional salespeople do not present information to prospects and hope they will choose to buy. They offer the information and ask the prospect to act – to make the purchase. You need to do that in every ad you create. Depending upon your desired response, include buttons or links asking the reader to respond. “Click Here to Buy,” “Like This Page,” or “Click Here to Receive My Newsletter” for example.

Follow these tips in creating Facebook ads and expect a transformation of public response to your advertising.

10 Tips for Marketing Your Business with Facebook Groups

The key to marketing success is getting an effective promotional message about your company in front of large numbers of potential customers. Facebook Groups is an excellent tool for making large numbers of people aware of your business, your products or services, and your message. For dramatic increases in the visibility of your company, you might:

Search Groups for interests that you would expect your customers to have. For example, if you sell camping gear, search for groups using keywords like camping, hunting, or outdoors. You will find many groups that are relevant to your business. Don’t hesitate to join them all.
Post to those groups, and do it often. Posting more than once a day is helpful. More posts increase the likelihood that any individual member of the group will see your post. Since you may be joining dozens of groups, unique posts for each group would be impractical. Create posts that can be used across the whole range of groups you have joined.
Use images in your posts. Images get far more interest and response than simple text posts.
Include links to your website or a call to action (“Click for more information” for example) with images. Your first goal is to build exposure, and a large fan base is evidence of that growing exposure. You want the group’s members to go to your Facebook page, where they will find more information about you, your company and your products.
Create some item that can be emailed at regular intervals. Whether in posts to the group or on your Facebook page, you should have a call to action – Sign Up For My Newsletter, for example. When visitors sign up for that newsletter you grow your email list, which can become an entirely separate marketing tool.
Do not post only ads to the groups. Also create posts that actually provide value, whether entertainment or information, to the reader. You want to build a relationship with the reader that makes them more inclined to trust your business.
Whether posting ads or informative or entertaining posts, address problems that your product or service will solve for them. It doesn’t have to be a blatant cry for their business. Just making people think about the problem and creating an awareness that you can help contributes to the relationship.
Use giveaways to encourage visits to your Facebook page. Giveaways don’t have to be costly. An informative report that addresses visitors’ interests or can cost you nothing to put together and increase your Facebook fan’s interest in your business.
In all of your efforts, keep in mind that your success is dependent upon building a relationship with the individuals in the group and with the visitors to your Facebook page. Whether they are a few dozen or a few thousand, gear your campaigns to individuals, not groups.
Be Honest. Sure, that’s your intention, but don’t let promotional puffery slip over into false statements. Assume that the reader will at some point become aware that a claim or a promise was false. When they reach that awareness, all of your effort toward building a relationship is at risk. It is much better to promise less and deliver on every promise.

For an explosive growth in your Facebook Page’s fan base, and a corresponding growth in sales, there is no more effective single tool than Facebook Groups. Make them a consistent element of your marketing plan.

10 Tips for Marketing Your Business with Facebook Pages

In the process of looking for ways to increase sales, you have probably realized the root question in any marketing campaign is “How do I get information about my business in front of people?” Before you even decide on the content of your marketing message, you have to know that people will see it. That means knowing where people will be.

Facebook is where people are, with over 1.3 billion active users. And on any given day, 48% of them log on. You can target your desired demographic in that enormous audience by creating a Facebook Page, so let’s look at some ways to use a Facebook Page to market your business.

Create a page. That is your starting point, so don’t put it off. It is quick, easy and free. You can have a Facebook page for your business up and running in less than an hour, and you can refine it as frequently as you wish.
Add a cover and a profile picture. Some graphic representation of your business (a photo or your logo, for instance) will create brand awareness for that image. People that have visited your Facebook Page will have a connection with all of the information they have received there whenever they see that it.
Add a “Call to Action.” On the Cover area of your page, set up a call to action. Use it. Also use Call to Action buttons or links in your posts and in ads you create. Responses to a Call to Action build your fan base and create alternative ways to market to those fans.
Add a description of your business. This is the first place visitors will see information about the nature of your business. You have two places for descriptions – a short one (155 characters) and a long one. Use both.
Add contact information to encourage prospects to find you. Add your address, telephone number and website URL to your page. Some businesses will use a Facebook Page in lieu of a website. If you have a website, though, a leading function of the Facebook Page will be to drive traffic to it.
Post on your personal Facebook Profile to acquaint your friends with your Facebook Page. Ask them to Like your Facebook Page. (Another Call to Action!)
Through your Page, connect with Facebook Groups that have the interests that you expect your customers will have. There is no better way to increase your business’ exposure quickly.
Start posting and do it often. You increase the chances of any given Facebook fan seeing your post when you post at least two or three times per day.
Do not post only ads on your page. Your main reason for creating the page is to increase your business, but an advantage of Facebook over most marketing tools is the ability to build a relationship with prospects. Give them reasons to like you. Give them entertaining and informative posts, as well as ads.
Allow others to post to your Page. This provides an opportunity for two-way communication with prospects – another step in building a relationship rather than merely dispensing ads. There are options available to provide monitoring so you can protect your page from inappropriate language, for example.