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INTRODUCTION
Maximizing Your Business with Facebook
The term “Social Media Marketing” is becoming common. While a year ago it used to be SEO or Search Engine Optimized content, which is basically content with a few specific keywords, put in here and there, the trend nowadays is with various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to increase the profile of a website. The Internet is evolving quickly and something new concerning how you can improve your site's profile is coming up almost on a monthly basis.
Specifically, with Facebook there is a lot of information floating around the net about how essential it is for businesses to be on their website. Yet, many businesses have an innate fear of social networking as such because of their concerns with data security. This is the dilemma that most SMB or Small to Medium Businesses face, whether to be on Facebook or not.
This guide's purpose is to discuss in detail what exactly Facebook is and how using it can help any small business become bigger than imagined through social networking.
Introduction
What is Facebook?
Facebook is a social networking site that was launched in February 2004, by January 2011, it had garnered over 600 million users. It is now considered the third largest web based company in the US after Google and Amazon and usually has more visitors every day than Google.
Even though Facebook my not be considered large when compared to the behemoths that are Google or Amazon, its growth rate has been so fast that people now feel that ignoring Facebook is at their own peril. Even a year ago, Facebook was considered as some-thing for the younger generation – in fact when it was launched first by founder Mark Zuckerberg; it was a place where his classmates and then his college mates at Harvard could share information about themselves.
However, this has seen a radical change. While last year the under 25 age group made up 58% of the population in Facebook right now it is has come down to 40%. This is not so much because younger population is not using Facebook anymore; they still are at the same pace they used to, but because of the increase of other age groups in new registrations. A look at the registration statistics will show this. The those between the ages 35 to 55 has grown at an astounding 277% while the 55+ age group has shown a remarkable 195% increase in new registrations. This is definite proof that the “young” sheen has worn out of Facebook.
There are also other reasons for this, like Facebook's new initia-tives to include businesses, with their social plug-ins and authenti-cating user logins. Although their analytics tool is not as sophisticated as Google's it offers much more in details including demographic information that is invaluable for most businesses.
It is not that everything is to the positive, there are negatives to using Facebook, and primary among this is the fear of data leakage in organizations. Yet, everything has its negatives, and it only remains to be seen if the positives are compelling enough to justify having a Facebook account.
Introduction
This guide will be divided into three broad sections, the first would deal with why Facebook is important for most SMB's, the second will deal with how exactly they can use Facebook to their advantage, and the last will be the negatives to using Facebook.
WHY FACEBOOK IS IMPORTANT FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
Increase Web Presence
This is the most basic reason for you to do anything online, because it increases your web
presence. Any business has only one objective, and that is sales, be it a product or a service. The only way to do this is to make people aware that you are providing a particular product or service. Companies spend between 3% and 10% of their total sales just to do this. In corporate parlance, this is called marketing, when you advertise in different venues so that you let people know exactly what it is that you provide.
With so much of money at stake companies are always looking for ways in which they can get the same kind of exposure without spending as much money and the web is giving them that opportu-nity. More than 75% of the population in Western countries has broadband connections at home; more and more people are going online for their needs. Sales are slowly but surely moving towards online, and many manufacturers are already taking advantage of this.
Amazon is posting a 15% growth each year, and their profits have skyrocketed in the past couple of years. In fact, even during the downturn, they were one of the few industries that posted growth.
There are a number of benefits to buying online, primary among them being lower cost and this benefit is hard to match in retail sales.
Many organizations have taken notice of this growth and even though their online marketing budget is only around 14% of their overall marketing budget, it is a large increase from last year's 8%. Everyone realizes that the future is online, but there are still a number of organizations that are still wary. It has grown so fast that it has caught many companies by surprise.
With its enormous reach, especially in certain markets and demo-graphics where traditional marketing does not have much impact, Facebook offers an inexpensive, yet quite effective way to put your company's face on the World Wide Web. Just having a website is not enough and everyone knows this. While there are alternatives to Facebook is dominating the social network sites and their 600 million users force you to consider the amount of people that you could possibly reach. With Facebook now surpassing Google in the number of people who visit them every day, this is becoming more compelling.
INCREASE BRAND IMAGE
This is a carry on from the previous point. The aim behind increasing web presence is to not only increase the brand awareness, but also increase brand image. While brand awareness or brand recall is easily achieved with advertising, increasing brand image is a little more difficult. Companies spend years developing a certain image for their brand, and any decision with regards to a new product is taken considering if it will fit the brand image or not.
Online this is not as difficult. Although the basics remain the same, it is much cheaper to develop a brand online than offline. For example, customer service online is usually restricted to email and responses to blog posts and questions in the forum. This is much easier to handle, and much cheaper in fact, than real time call centers where people answer your calls.
Of course, emails may not be able to fully replace human interac-tion, but it can reduce it by quite a big margin. In the same way advertising as well as promotion of a product is much cheaper online than it is in the real world.
Brand building is all about creating an image of the brand in the minds of the people, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to increase the interaction between the general population and the organization. While having a website is the bare minimum that an organization should do, there is not much interaction you can have with your customers through your website. Many sites have a “con-tact us” link and some even have a complaints page where you can log in and put in your complaints, but doing so in Facebook just increases the personal touch.
For example, while if you manufacture toasters and if a customer has a complaint with it, there is not much of a different between asking them to log into your website and post their complaint and asking them to do so on your Facebook page. The difference is that in Facebook they will be connected to you, so that as soon as a response is posted they will know about it instantly. While companies that do not have good customer service may not find this to be of much use, companies that spend on customer satisfaction will definitely find this useful. Imagine if you have a team that has a turn around time of less than four hours for every complaint, this is a good way to make your customers really feel that you care by giving them a resolution in under four hours. Even if you had as good a team, there is no point in it unless the customer realizes it, and Facebook ensures that your customers do.
Of course, you can integrate all the different facets into your customer service so that they receive and answer via email or even message to their phone that their issue has been resolved, but this calls for resources. In Facebook, everything is available. If a person connects to you on Facebook you do not have to worry about anything else other than resolving their issue, Facebook takes care of the rest. Not only this, but the customer's own personal network will also be aware of your response, especially if he clicks on a “thumbs up” sign signifying that he was happy with your service. This may take time to build, but it gives you more returns than any other CRM tool.
Having a website is all good and well, but just as you have different clothing for different purposes, you need different tools for different purposes. The advantage of Facebook is that it has an already existing infrastructure as well as over 600 million users, while at the same time being cheap to use, so you do not have to spend any resources in developing a tool for yourself.
INCREASE CUSTOMER INTERACTION
Once again, this dovetails into the previous topic in that Face-book, as an existing networking tool gives you the option of using it to interact with your customers, at no cost to you. Simply having a corporate page on Facebook means that you will get people who are interested in you come and visit you. In addition, anyone who clicks on your fan button will have your logo on his or her profile. While this may not be a big plus with many SMB's initially, over time a fan base can be created. Added to this is the fact that you are linked to these contacts' contacts as well, which will help maximize your company’s visibility.
Because Facebook is a place where people network it is a great place for you to bring out any news regarding your company. For example, if you are bringing out a new product, mentioning this on Facebook is a good idea as it will help generate interest in the product.
You can use Facebook as a means of providing discounts to your customers if they purchase a product or service using their Facebook login, they will get a discount on the product. A simple example is the release of video games. When the smash hit Call of Duty 6 was released into the market, it was an almost instant hit getting so many downloads that their servers started to hang. Most of this was because of their shrewd marketing through the social media. Interest was generated in the game by targeting a few fans and sending them unique invitations to the next in series.
Studying how exactly they did all this mostly using Internet based tools is a lesson on what can be accomplished online, with the minimum of expense. Another company that sells software for different purposes uses its Facebook fan base as a pre-launch testing team to get feedback about the application.
How exactly you interact with your customers is up to you, just remember that Facebook offers you an existing network that you can exploit. Depending on how innovative you make this interaction, you can get huge dividends from little outlay in terms of expense and time.
LEAD GENERATION
This is one use of Facebook that many people do not make use of. Facebook has a lot of information about its users, and this informa-tion is made available to others depending on the privacy level that the users specify. Whenever they use their Facebook ID to log into your site, (if you install this facility of course), Facebook will make available to you as much information as the user has in his or her public profile.
This means that when it comes to savvy people who are aware of how Facebook works, you may well only get general information like email addresses. Email addresses are useful tool considering that the email address on Facebook will mostly be genuine. When it comes to users who are either not knowledgeable enough about the different privacy settings in Facebook or are just not bothered enough, you can get much more information from Facebook.
This can help you not only generate more leads for your ad campaign but also target it to specific niches based on the informa-tion that you get from Facebook. For example, if you are selling fitness equipment, you will probably be able to target your campaign to those people whose profile lists anything related to fitness as their hobbies. Not only is the campaign going to be much cheaper, it is also going to be much more effective, because you will never be able to target the audience in such a focused manner anywhere else.
As mentioned, the amount of information that is made available to you by Facebook depends on the users themselves, so there is always the chance that users will not make much information avail-able to you. Yet, this method is still effective because you will get the basic information that you know is at least accurate and not outdated.
This facet of Facebook is even more useful when you consider the kind of business you deal in. If your business is local in nature, you can focus your search to a particular geographic area so that you know that any leads generated would be useful. This is much better than spending time on worldwide customers who are not going to benefit your business in any way.
GAIN NEW FRIENDS
This may not be a top reason, but it still has its uses. For example, if any user wishes to be friends with you and clicks on the friends tab in your company profile page, you can configure your account to accept friends by default. That way every person who becomes your friend is accepted as one by you. You are not only connected to them, but to their friends as well through their Facebook account.
This may take a little bit of time to net results, but as a long-term option to increase the profile of your organization it is a good idea. This is especially true if you have a dedicated person to maintain the profile of the company and put in any information about the company on a regular basis. They can also respond to queries or take note of any complaints. You are creating a certain loyalty in your network by working to take care of their issues so that the next time they want something they will come to you. They will recommend you to others and your network will be able to continue to expand.
Since you are an organization here, you can basically connect with everyone who wants to connect with you and over time, your network can only increase. With the pace at which the virtual world moves, many people are actually saying that they get their news from the social media long before they get it from the mainstream cable news channels. People are starting to rely on Facebook to get infor-mation that they need, rather than go through the news and then filter out what they do not need. If you like tennis, but are not inter-ested in politics, you can keep abreast of what is happening in the tennis world while not having to sit through the political news to get to the sports.
This kind of targeting means that your network will be full of only people who are interested in you as they have the option of leaving your network at any time. This becomes useful when it comes to sales conversions, which is our next point.
SELLING
The first thing that you should realize is that Facebook is a social network site. This means that you cannot actively canvass for sales the way you would elsewhere. Yet, simply because there is such a large network out there, there are things that you can do to increase your sales using your social network.
To bring back the example of the launch of Call of Duty, the producers of the game started their marketing months before the launch of their product. They sent out coded messages to people who were big in the gaming world. This included not only die-hard Call of Duty fans, but also critics. The code had to be cracked, and when you did that, it gave the URL to a new game that was supposed to come out soon.
There was nothing about Call of Duty in this strategy at all, yet because the URL had short scenes from the game, most people knew that it had to be Call of Duty because it coincided with their release schedule. This led to a storm of activity with gamers discussing about the merits and demerits of the new game, and all this without any basic information regarding the actual game.
When the activity levels started to die down a carefully choreo-graphed leak would send the gamers into another storm until finally when the game was actually released there was so much demand for it that it grossed $410 million on the day of its launch, an all time record, putting to shame high grossing movies like Harry Potter.
Most of this was done only using social media, and even if Face-book did not play any part in this, it still shows the potential that an innovative strategy can have on sales. In addition, all this would not have cost 1/100th of the cost of traditional marketing. The producers were shrewd enough to use the strengths of such a network and the results are there for all to see.
Of course, the product itself was a good one, and the previous editions of the same game were top sellers themselves, so the producers had a base from which to work. The basic principles however do not change.
There are a number of other companies that use their Facebook fan base to do beta testing. The advantage of being a fan of the orga-nization is that, you get to do free beta testing, and they get a discount when they do buy the product. This is a win-win situation for both the network as well as the company because their fan base will assure them of a minimum number of sales.
The kind of strategy depends on the kind of product you have to sell, and you cannot very well do beta testing for a new landscape design, if that is what your company does. Yet, it gives you the oppor-tunity to try something really innovative, and the best part is that this is not expensive at all.
When Call of Duty had its beta testing, they had to rely on their fan base built over years but through their own network built at their own cost. Now, you have the opportunity to use an already existing network to try out your own unique marketing strategy and at little to no cost to you.
COMMUNITY PAGES
This is the reason why many manufacturers are wary of Face-book. Facebook launched their community pages in April 2010 and created a furor of complaints about how it was not only useless but was actually damaging for small business owners. Facebook has since gone out of its way to educate people on what exactly the community pages were and how it could be used.
The community pages is a feature that you can create in Face-book, much like a forum or a blog. It is easy to set up and you can have your own community. While this may not be absolutely neces-sary considering that Facebook in itself a networking place, a sepa-rate community page gives many advantages.
When Facebook launched this initiative, it created a few hundred thousand community pages by default based on information they had about existing networks. Many businesses thought that this was not only pointless; it was an infringement because these pages were not created by them. These pages were, however, totally community driven, and while there were pages with as few as one or two fans, there were others with thousands.
While this left most businesses thinking that they had gotten the short end of the stick, over time these community pages actually started serving a useful purpose. Most of the more online perceptive companies employ a few people to search the net to gather informa-tion on what exactly is the public perception of the organization. While in the real world this is usually done using polls, it was much easier and cheaper to do so online. All one had to do was to monitor these community pages, or forums to know what was being said about the organization. If there were complaints, it did not take long to track these members down and mail them regarding their difficulty.
This was a huge opportunity for organizations that were willing to take the bull by the horns. While these forums were community driven, it gave organizations an existing framework where they could deal with customer service issues. This strategy is simple, yet effec-tive, and Google is a good example for how an organization can use these forums to their advantage.
When Google released their browser “Google Chrome” there were a number of issues with it. In fact, many critics said that it did not deserve the Google name. There were so many complaints about the browser that if you look back now, you would wonder how it survived the beta phase itself. Google tackled this in a unique way. They had a Google employee keep track of these forums and answer any complaints that came up. The effectiveness of this strategy can be discovered when you consider that the stable version of Chrome was launched in December 2008. By Jan 2011, it had garnered an 11% share in the browser market and was the third most widely used browser in the world, rapidly approaching Firefox's share of around 30%.
With the number of faults that the beta version had, this kind of growth is surprising. This is even more surprising considering that when the beta version was launched in Sep 2008 it hit 1% almost immediately. By October, however, this had dropped to 0.69% because of the number of issues it had. Yet, they have reached 11% in just two years. Most of this is because Google kept its ear to the ground, had employees tracking forums where the faults were discussed. In many cases if a solution was not possible a bug report was filed in the customer's stead and the link was posted back to the forum. This generated a lot of goodwill so many users continued to use Chrome because they were sure that people were working to sort out the issues.
Although these community pages are just another kind of a forum, the advantage this gives is that it is within the Facebook network. This means that all users get the advantage of being connected all the time.
USE FACEBOOK as an Advantage
There are a number of ways to do this. Being on Facebook is not an end in itself; it is only a means to an end. You should start looking at Facebook as a tool that you can use, and if you change your mind to think this way, you will start thinking of different and unique ways to use Facebook to your advantage.
For example, many top CRM tools can be quite expensive, but it is money that will have to be spent if you want to give your customers a good customer service experience. Yet, Facebook offers you the advantage it being used much like a CRM tool but is totally free to use. It is also not as resource heavy in the sense that you do not need as much labor because of the way in which Facebook is designed.
While this is only an example, it shows how Facebook can be used in unique ways. There are several other ways in which Facebook can be used to maximize your business potential. Starting from the basic things that every SMB owner needs to do, we will discuss all these techniques in detail.
CREATE a Personal Profile
While your company needs to have a company page, it is impera-tive that you as the owner should have their own profile that you can link with the company. This is important because of the way Face-book users behave.
One of the most common behavior patterns of most Facebook users is to check out the profile page of all their friends, and those that they are interested in. While your company may have its own profile page on Facebook, most people are aware that the company is just as good as its management is and so will be interested in finding out about the owner.
Facebook operates on a platform of total transparency and trust. This is why except for any portion of your profile that you purpose-fully keep hidden under different privacy settings, everything about you is open to public view. Most people do not have any problem with this, and most only make sure that they keep private informa-tion like home address, or telephone numbers hidden. If your company's is a stand alone page and does not link back to its owner, or top management, it sends out the wrong signals.
Facebook users want personal information. They would like to know if you are married; have kids, what your interests are, general information that however makes them feel that they understand you better, rather than just a one-liner saying that you are the owner/pro-prietor of a small business.
Not only that, but people that you link with on a personal level will be connected to your company as well, and those who come across your personal profile will be prompted to check out your company's home page too.
Even if this does not net you any business and there is no reason why this should not, it will at least increase the page views on your company's profile. Since Facebook is public, Google will rank your company's page based on how many clicks it gets internally on Face-book, meaning that you have another way of increasing your compa-ny's exposure on the net.
FACEBOOK NEWS FEED
This is one of the most useful things about Facebook for most SMB owners. Facebook has two different kinds of news feeds, one is a mini feed that is free to use and another that is the main news feed. You need to pay to use the main news feed or be willing to build an application for it, but the mini feed is free and works just as well if used properly.
The mini feed is supposed to be a place where friends can find out what has happened with others in their network. When a Face-book user networks with you on any level, Facebook adds a mini feed to their profile that feeds back to you. When you publish anything, it is sent via this mini feed to your entire network, and if what you have to say is exciting, you can crawl across various networks getting expo-sure in the hundreds of thousands in a matter of days. All feeds from a user's network is amalgamated into one home page that is the first page that comes up when they log in.
The kind of exposure that this gives is enormous because most people are interested in knowing what is happening within their network. Of course, with Facebook's preoccupation with spammers, it would not be a good idea to use this feature as a marketing ploy. Even if it is not stopped now, you will actually be shooting your foot in two ways. You will be causing people to leave your network in droves because they find that all you have to say is promoting some product or the other. All they have to do is to unsubscribe to your feed, and you have effectively lost your network even if they remain connected to you through other channels. You will also be bringing yourself to the notice of Facebook administrators, and if they shut down your...
Facebook for Business
account for spamming, you have lost months and maybe years of hard work for nothing.
However, it is still a good venue to pass along information. For example, if you sell software, and want to do a pre-launch beta testing for a new iPhone app, sending out a feed that Facebook users can use their logins to download the app is a great idea. Not only will people in your immediate network connect to try out the software, this news is sure to spread across other networks giving you huge numbers. In fact, you will have reached millions of iPhone users within a matter of days, and every Facebook user who has an iPhone is a potential candidate. Many people actually use this beta testing for two purposes.
One, to get feedback about bugs in their software, and second is that many out of these numbers who download the software to try it out do so to find out if it is useful to them. They are not doing it to give reviews, although there are a few who do that. Thus, if your soft-ware is good enough, most of these numbers will pay the conversion fee when you go online with it.
You may have to give a discount, but considering that you already have a specific number of users, you can afford to do this. Of course, if you do not give any discount, chances are that the next time you do any beta testing, the numbers will fall drastically.
This strategy will work for any sector you are in as long as the feed is designed in a unique way. The unfortunate thing is that you cannot afford to have deals like this often. Once or twice a year is about the maximum. Yet, it is deals like this that gives you the maximum exposure. Using a like strategy to bring your company to the notice of a large number of people is the idea.
This is the baseline of all marketing, and using Facebook to do this is not only inexpensive, it takes only a couple of minutes to set up. As long as you have taken precautions to ensure that the increased traffic does not cause your site to crash, setting up the feed should take less than 10 minutes.
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