If you intend to drive traffic and promote your website or blog you cannot afford to not have a Facebook presence. Facebook has become the ultimate social network on the Internet, so you absolutely need to have a presence on Facebook and leverage all the value . Facebook represents the best way for your content to go viral and communicate your brand or website to the masses. Trends keep changing, so you have to stay on top of things to generate as much traffic and exposure as possible. Here are some of the top ways to maximize your Facebook presence for your company or website:
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Social Plug-ins – Facebook has created a “social plugins” feature which allow you to tie Facebook into your site in several ways. The most important one right now is the Site commenting plug-in tool that allows people to comment on your site’s content and then share it to their Facebook Wall. Another great one is the Automatic site registration, a lot of advanced sites are using that. The Like button on all your product pages or blog posts is a must. This is an incredibly powerful way to help your site or blog go viral. Social plugins are a must and should be integrated into your website everywhere possible, as long as it’s called for.
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Offer discounts – One of the best ways to garner attention is to offer discounts. People love to get discounts, and especially if it’s quick and easy. We recommend running regular offers! The more offers you promote, greater the chance they will go viral and generate increased uptick.
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Encourage Customers to become Fans – Most people have a database of customers, friends, subscribers, referrals that have been acquired over the years. Whatever your database size, you should absolutely send them an email encouraging them to join your Facebook Fan Page. It definitely helps to offer some kind of incentive to increase their likelihood of becoming a fan, but in general this should be done periodically to your entire database converts to being your fans on Facebook.
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Contests - Periodic contests are a great way to seed virality on social networks. Not only will your existing fans love it, you will attract new fans by doing this. There are lots of apps that allow you run contests for a nominal fee. They handle all the tracking and reporting which is amazing, and they also give you the data of the people that participated in your promotion.
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Facebook Advertising – Facebook advertising represents the greatest opportunity to target your products or company in general to the Facebook audience. They have excellent targeting options that allow you to hone in on your ideal customer and advertise directly to them. For instance, if you are a flower shop in Mumbai, you can advertise to males, between the ages of 22-50, that live in Mumbai zip codes. Basically, people who you think would buy flowers locally. You can also do this nationally and broaden your reach. You can also include interest targeting by filtering based on “Likes” and “Interests” on Facebook to further specify the types of people you want to see your ads. Facebook advertising is on a cost-per-click (like Google paid search) or a CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions).
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Sponsored Stories – Sponsored Stories are the latest thing Facebook has rolled out for advertisers. It seems to have a ton of potential to open up more targeted advertising.
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Fan Messaging and Marketing – Once you have built up your fans you can start messaging them. You can send them emails with a message, promotion, and links to whatever you want. When you decide to run your contest or sweepstakes you can email all your fans and let them know about it, as well as posting a status update with a link to the promotion. There’s also a Facebook fan invite feature in the admin area, where if you have a csv file of a database it will tell you who is already on Facebook and send them an invite to your fan page. You should have some kind of strategy when you message your fans and have a purpose behind it or it won’t really be as effective as it can be.
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Facebook Strategy – Every business decision needs to be backed by a sound strategy in place. Make sure you decide before hand what are your objectives and perform monthly iterations to ensure you are on track.
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Adapting – Facebook is an ever-evolving platform that is the dominant player in the social networking space, so you have no choice but to completely embrace it and work with it to maximize what you can do to make your brand more pervasive. These are some ideas that we have jotted down, but there is ALWAYS more that can be done in this day and age.
