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Starting out with social media and your business – part one: facebook

Posted on 07. Apr, 2010 by Sheryl in All blog posts, facebook, internet demystified, social media

As if promoting your business offline isn’t enough we now have to invest time and energy into promoting our businesses online. Having a website is only the beginning we have to consider many options of spreading our word on a much larger scale. The great thing about online promotion is it’s relatively inexpensive and fairly measureable. However there is a misconception that results happen overnight, this is definitely not the case you’re in for the long haul. This is the first in a series of articles about simple ways to get started with your online campaign.

The Facebook page

As much as you may disagree I believe as a business wishing to promote yourself online you need a facebook page. Many of your competitors already have one and there is a massive audience of people who use facebook as their main online communication or web presence and in fact are using facebook to find services or products ahead of google. These people may not find your website but you will have a much greater chance of them finding you via your facebook page.

So how do you get a facebook page? First you need a facebook profile then assuming you already have one you just create a page for your business that is attached to your profile. You can then do some pretty cool stuff with it using applications (apps) like connect to your twitter account (if you have one), add your blog posts automatically via ‘notes’ and if you want to get really technical there are some apps to enable HTML so you can make the page look well branded and not just a rather plain facebook page. Here’s a great example – http://www.facebook.com/vspink

So big deal you’ve now got a facebook page, what happens next?

Obviously you need to promote it. The first thing to do is invite your immediate facebook network to become fans, then their are ways that facebook make promotion easier by using facebook ads, badges, boxes, icons etc. You can setup a facebook ad campaign which randomly appears on the sidebar of your ‘target market’ facebook pages. This is paid advertising and is a way of reaching out to people well beyond your own facebook network. They are easy to setup yourself by logging into your facebook profile, clicking on to ‘ads & pages’ and then creating an ad campaign.

You can add fan boxes or badges to your website. We do this by pasting code into your website page or sidebar, the code is found on your facebook page under ‘promote your page’ then ‘promote with a fanbox’. The result looks like this:

“Geeze not many fans” I hear you say. Well this is where patience comes in. It’s all a bit experimental to see what works best. Syrup magazine is also running a monthly draw for facebook fans whereby all new fans for the month go in the draw to win a gorgeous recipe book.

So what is the point of all this?

Other than the fact that you are now worn out from checking how many facebook fans you have every 30 seconds. The key to all of this is AUDIENCE. You are growing an audience who is interested in your brand. And if you want your audience to grow you need to show that you are regularly changing and evolving your business and responding to your audience. Then your audience will reciprocate by listening, reading, talking about you and purchasing from you.

Lastly if all of this scares the bajeebas out of you then talk to us about huia social media consulting packages and we’ll help you on your way.

Next week: part two – getting your head around twitter

Tags: facebook for business, facebook page