One of my most popular posts has been “How to Market Your Business on Facebook“. It was first posted in August of 2009 and has been updated several times.
Seems like a series may be in order!
Just found a great post about how to comment as yourself on your own fan page. Don’t know about you but it’s something I’ve been wondering for a while. The long and short of it is, you can’t. But there are some ideas of how to work around it without violating Facebook’s terms of service.
Those of you thinking of setting up a Facebook Fan page for your business may want to read these posts first so you know the pros and cons of setting up. Right now it doesn’t look like you can transfer the fan pages to another account, so you may want to set it up originally with 2 administrators, just in case something happens to your original account or to you. You can add admins, but you probably should do it before there is a problem.
The good thing about a Fan Page (versus promoting your company on your profile) is that by using privacy settings you can separate your company from your personal profile. That way information that you’d like potential clients to read and respond to doesn’t get mixed up with the individual comments that you make as a family member or friend to your personal contacts.
As my Facebook friends know, I subscribe to my fan pages with Networked Blogs in Facebook, so my family and friends are subjected to my non-stop marketing talk as well. Sorry!! (But, not very sorry though!) Because I use my Facebook Fan pages for business, and I use various privacy settings, my fans are not subjected to my personal vacation photos and individual wall messages to friends & family. So I’ve got a one way funnel of work into personal, but not personal into work. Makes sense, right?
Here’s one of my favorite links about the privacy settings explanation in Facebook, showing you how to control the privacy of each bit of content you post on Facebook.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow! What a discovery. I’ve been using Facebook as part of business marketing. I’m glad I’ve come across the information about the Fan Page. Thanks. I appreciate it.
Great guidance, Chris. We also separate our business communication on Facebook from personal communication by having a company fan page. Content on this page is different from what I post on my personal page, for exactly the reasons you’ve stated in your blog.
I ended up just toting a mini whiteboard around with me all week instead. I’m sure I looked like quite the winner with my whiteboard in hand. I wonder if people think all mozzers are required to carry a whiteboard around. LOL!
Chris,
Great insight. One other thing is Facebook advertising. The current ad model is ripe for small business.
You can either pay CPM or CPC. Facebook is a great way to “brand” your company in your market by targeting select zip codes along with the optimal demographic information.
One hidden trick is receiving impressions for a very low cost. You can create an ad on Facebook with your logo & ad text with really no call-to-action for the user to click. Facebook will give this ad impressions for free (since your on the CPC model).thinking it will get clicks.
In time after receiving low clicks your CPC estimate will rise but Facebook will keep serving you the impressions. It’s very easy to get 250,000 impressions for about 10% of the cost of what a billboard on I-90 would have cost your small business. Easy & budget friendly way to brand your small business.
Your brand is how customers feel about you..Your personal identify is how people react on your communication. In this new media or you can say MEDIA age you have to do your branding in Nth dimensions. Well yes, anybody can do communication by creating a page/profile on facebook or continuously posting tweets on twitter but you can not do effective communication without having in-depth knowledge about social media engagement. You need to learn the ability to spread your story and nudge people down the sales funnel at zero incremental cost.
If you don’t like change you are going to like irrelevance even less.
If anybody is interested on learn the ability to spread your story using facebook or interested in the development of a facebook app or custom facebook page in most effective manner than contact us at cygnismedia.com
Facebook is the best place to market your brand and getting customers so fast. The best way to market your brand on facebook are Facebook Fan Pages and Facebook ad’s/
Facebook is becoming a huge platform for marketers.