Facebook is the champ of social media sites, and number one spot where friends connect. Facebook is not only a place where friends met but it has also grown in businesses to market themselves through interaction with customers and self-promotion.
Whether you’re a big company or a small local business, Facebook is a powerful marketing tool. Facebook is a great space to keep customers informed about new product or service , develop brand identity, and broaden your reach.
In one word Facebook is a Pro Business Development Tool!
5 Ways to use Facebook as Business Development Tool
In this post we will be looking at five ways you can use Facebook as business development tool
1. Making the Most of Your Facebook Business Page
A Facebook page is a great free tool for businesses marketing which let businesses identify themselves not by just through listing product and offerings services, but also by sharing links, images.
Facebook business page is a great place to develop your brand identity and show your human side. Don’t be afraid to be funny.If you are a mobile company you might consider post like this.
Ultimately you should consider what your key audience would want to see. Share social media images, links, videos, anything, as long as it is connected to your business and it seems like something your target audience would enjoy.
2. Facebook Advertising: Classic Ads
Facebook offers its own form of advertising with Facebook ads, which appear in the side columns of the Facebook site. These ads are referred as Marketplace Ads. They include a headline with copy, an image, and a click-through link to either a Facebook page, a Facebook app, or an outside website.
Facebook advertising features include
- The ability to set ad budgets.
- Demographic targeting by Facebook user data on location, age, interests, and educations.
- Built-in ad performance measurement tools.
- Ad testing, in which multiple ad versions can be run in order to compare ad designs and setup.
Using Facebook advertising to increase your “Likes” can be beneficial once a user likes your page, they become followers of your business page, and your posts will appear on their Facebook news feed.
This results in more users interacting with you, your page and your brand, devloping relationships that may end up translating to conversions in the future.
3. Hosting Facebook Contest
Running Facebook contests, promotions, or sweepstakes is another Facebook marketing tactic that can increase fans and brand awareness.
When conducting a Facebook contest, be aware that contests can’t be hosted through Facebook itself you can’t ask for likes as entries, have people write answers in the comments, etc.Businesses must use a third-party app for creating their Facebook contest, then direct users to the app from their Facebook page.
There are plenty of paid tools to help you to do this easily, as well as some free ones. Shortstack offers a number of contest templates for free , so long as your page has under 2,001 likes. Pagemodo also has a free option in them. Many third-party Facebook contest apps offer free facilities, but your options with them are limited as well.
4. Facebook Promoted Posts
Facebook Promoted Posts let Facebook page owners pay a very flat rate in order to have their individual Facebook posts reach a certain number of users to page, increasing a specific post’s reach and impressions.
Some businesses have asked many times – why should I have to pay to ensure that my post is seen by my users who are my followers? If a user has liked my page, they should always see my all posts on their news feed, shouldn’t they? The answer to this question is simply no, because it assumes that users spend every waking moment of his/her life on Facebook’s news feed. For the health and safety of your Facebook fans weather it is he or she , we hope this isn’t true!
If a fan of your page or say business happens to be looking at their news feed when you post your story, they are likely to see it, but even then there is no guarantee if their news feed is swamped by other posts. That’s where Promoted Posts comes in – it ups to your chance of being seen on a user’s news feed.Posts promoted by Facebook are shown to existing fans, with an added option to reach friends of fans.
Promoted Posts are easy to set up – just clicking the button beneath any of your page posts.
While the flat rate simplifies the process, Promoted Posts lack the targeting options offered by Facebook ads.
5. Sponsored Stories
Sponsored Stories are the type of Facebook ad that shows a user’s interaction, such as a Facebook like, to the user’s friends.
Sponsored Stories seeks to capitalize on the “word of mouth” marketings concept. If a user sees that three of his friends like a certain page, he is more excited to pay attention. The goal of Sponsored Stories is to have a user take the same action as their friends have taken. Advertisers can choose to show friends “likes” if they all want more page likes, show friends who have “claimed this offer” if a business wants more users to claim offers, etc are ther.
While the action is performed by a friend liking a page or claiming an offer is automatically posted in a user’s news feed, these posts easily get overlooked by their friends. Sponsored Stories get preferred positioning, capable of appearing in the news feeds and the right side bar in Facebook. Sponsored Stories is also the only ad format which is available on mobile devices.
Sponsored Stories don’t only apply to likes or offers – they can be used with any of the Facebook Open Graph app. If a friend has just install Scramble With Friends on Facebook, Sponsored Stories can show users that their friend has just played the Scramble games, with an invite to “challenge them,” “play with them,” or any.
Facebook claims that if any Sponsored Stories have 47% higher CTRs and 20% lower CPCs than regular Facebook ads, making them a very serious strategy for marketing on Facebook.
Facebook Sponsored Stories can be created easily through the Facebook ad create flow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-juAkezMg
Image Credits : Wikipedia
