With the population of Facebook users now exceeding 1billion, many businesses are turning to the social platform for a new outlook on advertising. Building a Facebook Page and getting the name of your company out there starts the ball rolling. With an audience that large on Facebook, the social media platform has many filters and tools in place to help you and your business engage the appropriate target market. These include:
– Facebook Ads
– Demographic Filters
– Audience Choice
– Campaign Selection
– Measure Ad Performance
– Graph Search *NEW! (See description at bottom)
Branding
As we all know, the brand of your company is very important. It’s how people look at your company and decide whether they want to do business with you. If you use Facebook correctly, your brand will be recognized as that top-notch company you want.
When Building or Updating Your Brand on Facebook
Even if you don’t work for a huge name company, there are still many ways that Facebook Advertising can assist you. When you use the Facebook Ads, Demographic Filters, and Audience Choice tools for your business’s page, make sure you choose the ones that best describe your company. Joe’s Meat Market in Pittsburgh, Pa. is going to want to appeal mainly to local patrons who like meat, so we would want to make sure that Joe uses the demographics filter and some keywords involving animal provisions. This would allow people in the area to see the meat market close by. If Joe includes his address on the page, more people in that area are likely to view the page and actually be able to go there, instead of it coming up as an ad to someone in California and just forgetting about it. This will take some time, but once you build that brand on Facebook, you will get more name recognition and brand recommendation.
Engagement
This is huge! Once getting your Facebook page all set up, make sure to use it. When a potential customer posts a question, make sure to have someone at the company answer it. In some ways, these social networks can act as a forum to clients in the form of online tech support (who knew social media was effective for diagnostic computer work!) It is always good to have a designated person in the company to run the Facebook page. It’s best if this person knows the company inside and out, because what they say will be representing that brand we worked so hard for a paragraph back. This is a great avenue if you run services that inherently require engagement. For instance, e-therapist Melodie Parker runs a lot of services such as Mother Support Groups, Anxiety Support Groups, and Depression Support Groups. In each case, all of the members benefit by the highly active engagement of meeting other members of the group, who are going through similar life experiences.
Commitment
If you want to have a Facebook page succeed, you must manage it and prune it. It will take a lot of time to set up, and it will take time to manage it, but if you do it right, the outcome can be large! Measuring the performance of your ads will allow you to see what is working and what’s not. Posting pictures and keeping your audience updated with the company is crucial and must be incorporated for the Facebook page to grow.
Facebook Graph Search
With all that in mind, Facebook has been rolling out a new surprise that will make businesses on Facebook pretty happy, Graph Search. If you were one of the lucky few to have been selected to try out Graph Search before its release to the public, you would find it’s quite the little helper. Here are a few things that Graph Search does to help boost your marketing strategy:
Understand Your Consumer
Graph Search allows you to do research on the people who have liked your Facebook page. Those people are the ones who are most likely to be your customers now or in the future. You can type in “People who like (your business’s Facebook page)” to start your search. Finding out more about them will allow you to market to them more effectively.
Identify the Consumers You Aren’t Reaching
You can also use Graph Search to find the consumer you aren’t reaching, and then target them. You can send them promotions like coupons and discounts. By doing a Graph Search like “People near me who like (your product or service)” you can find the ones who you are most likely to succeed with. Using this in conjunction with searching for competitor’s customers is something you can also try for a chance at winning them away.
Do Basic Market Research
Instead of those specific searches, doing a more general search would be a good idea, too. Searching “People who like (your Facebook page) and like (anything else)” would be a good way of finding out what kind of items your customers or potential consumers like. If you own a restaurant you could try this out to find what kind of dishes your guests might like to see added to the menu.
Being in its first few weeks of activity, Graph Search is just coming into its own. We can be sure that in the future it will grow and more options will be available for it. With Graph Search and the other advertising tips given above, you’ll be sure to be a Facebook Marketing Guru! Give it a try and see how it can benefit the marketing of your business on Facebook.
Photo Credit: Flickr user laughingsquid
