How to Run a Successful Facebook Marketing Campaign

Facebook’s everywhere these days, which makes it all the more vital that your business is a part of it.  With the recent Facebook transition to the “Timeline” platform, businesses now have it easier than ever to reach out to customers and boost their business.

If you’re just getting started with Facebook, take a look at our free Ebook here for how to get started.  Once you get that account up and running, here’s how you can use Facebook to your advantage:

Promote your Website

Let’s start with the most important point of the lot. The whole point of Facebook for your business is to bring people back to your website.  Your website is ultimately the final selling tool that you’ll be using to turn any leads into customers, so it’s your goal to bring people there.

There are a number of ways in which you can promote your business on Facebook, such as:

• Post a link on Facebook to your website that has an “online only” promotional offer

• Give your Facebook “friends” a bit of a teaser of a blog or an article that you wrote, and encourage them to click on the link to your site for more information

• Offer something for free, like a tutorial or an Ebook, but in order to get it, they have to go to your website first

Encourage Participation

That being said, don’t make your Facebook business account strictly about you.  Ask your “friends” for their opinions on things related to your company or niche.  What are their biggest pet peeves?  What do they enjoy?  What do they think about “x” product versus “y” product?  The more you encourage your Facebook “friends” to participate on your Facebook page, the more “loyal” you’ll make them to your brand.  People love giving their opinion, and the more you make your Facebook page be a reciprocal relationship between you and the customer, the more likely they will be to do business with you either now or in the future.

Consider Facebook Advertising

Facebook offers a few different outlets for advertising on their site, though by far the most popular is their pay per click (PPC) campaign.  The great thing about a Facebook pay per click marketing campaign is that you’re able to really target qualified leads who may potentially want to do business with you. Facebook’s software platform is quite intuitive and it gathers quite a bit of information on its members.  They use this to the advertisers’ advantage.  For example, if you’re a new mother who has Googled “cloth diapering” in the past few days, there’s a good chance that right there on the right hand side of your Facebook page you’ll see an advertisement that’s related to either babies or cloth diapers.

Facebook also has a Sponsored Stories method of advertising, which is a bit less pushy than the standard PPC campaign.  Through Sponsored Stories, whenever a “friend” on someone’s Facebook list comments or “likes” or takes some kind of action on a Facebook business page, that action will then show up on each of their friends’ news feeds.  It’s a more natural and less blatant way of selling, which can definitely work to the advantage of a business.  Just also be wary that as it is more natural in appearance, it’s also easier to be overlooked and ignored.

To Recruit New Employees

One of the more surprising ways in which businesses have really been benefiting with Facebook is for employee recruitment.  When you think about it, it makes sense: Facebook gives you access to hundreds of millions of users worldwide.  You can save a ton of money on recruiting individuals through Facebook, which is free to use.  You can:

• Post job opportunities on your Facebook business site or on the pages of people you may see as potential candidates for the job

• Post information about your company, including text, video, and photographs, to make the company seem more interesting

• Use other tools to demonstrate who the company is and why someone would want to work with them

Key Takeaways:

Businesses are only beginning to understand just how Facebook can truly work to their advantage.  From website promotion to customer service to connecting with highly qualified employee candidates, there’s a lot that Facebook can offer a business, and all it costs you is a bit of your time.

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