What is Facebook Marketing?

Facebook Marketing is one of the greatest marketing inventions available on the internet today. Facebook has gone out of their way to create a “picture perfect” marketing platform, it’s far beyond seeing “just another ad” while surfing online. Facebook marketing is viral, easy to implement, and creates interaction between yourself and your customer, it really is a marketers dream.

For obvious reasons, different businesses need and want to market in different ways than others  - there is no single solution to everyone’s marketing needs. For this reason, Facebook has made it easy to use one of many different options they’ve created.

Currently there’s at least 6 different ways to market with Facebook.:

Facebook Applications:  Facebook Applications are incredibly good for games, tools, or engaging your customers with your product. Using it as a marketing tool can be done effectively by building your brand with consistent branding on users pages, and continuous reminders of your product.

Here are a few examples of Facebook Applications that I’ve been a part of –

A polling application – I had the great pleasure of working with a client who was interested in what the users of Facebook thought on certain topics. His target market isn’t on Facebook, but with the information he could gather by people using his application, he could easily get media attention with results that no one else in his very small but highly lucrative niche had. His Facebook marketing strategy wasn’t actually to market to the users of Facebook at all, but rather use Facebook as a marketing resource for his true customers.

A product launch through an application – suppose you have a cool tool that makes others lives much easier, and you want to share the benefits of this tool with the users of Facebook, and do this for free. Through building and designing this application, the application owner was able to expose his brand to prospective customers prior to his product being available for purchase. The client’s audience immediately saw the benefit of his product through the use of the application, and the product launch went very, very well. This application marketed a product that was yet to be in existence, but the application showed the rewards of being involved.

Facebook Applications need to be so interesting that almost anyone would like it, or so niche, that if you don’t belong to that niche, you would view the application as meaningless. Engage the user, build in the ability for the application to go viral, and let it work for you. Facebook did it right with applications.

Facebook Pages – Facebook Pages make a great resource to share what your business does. Notice I didn’t say market your business…

When I created my bestselling Myspace info product, the number one thing I pushed as being the most important surprised a lot of people – stop trying to sell, and start socializing. Remember the first word in Social Media, social.

There’s always a few people doing things right. Here’s some examples of those smart enough to stop marketing, and start socializing with Facebook Pages:

The owner of a plumbing company decided to give free information on plumbing through his Facebook Page. It sounds a little odd, and it is, but it worked. If you wanted to know how to check your water heater so that it doesn’t blow up and flood your house, he had a topic on it for people to talk about. If you were trying to replace your water heater with one more efficient, he had a topic on it on his Facebook Page. His Facebook Page became a resource for everyone, and if you happened to live in the area and need work done, he knew you would call him.

A came across the page of a jewelry company the other day, they had almost  250,000 fans on their Facebook Page. They were regularly making posts engaging users by asking questions like, “What’s your favorite type of stone, or favorite cut of diamond?” Not only are they keeping people involved with their page and engaging the customer in their product, they’re getting first hand information on what their customer wants. Absolutely brilliant.

Facebook Pages are great for creating community, and tying it into your business in a very cool way.

Facebook Advertising – Other social networks have made some pretty large mistakes when it comes to advertising. They’ll display only banner ads (which people have trained themselves to ignore) and sell the slots only to large businesses capable of paying thousands of dollars at a time.

Facebook Advertising allows anyone to advertise with the site. Facebook allows you to pay for either impressions or pay per click, and allows to your find your target audience, and even geo-target your audience. This means Facebook will only display advertisements to people that are already interested in your topic, and will only show it to those people within the network(s) that you have selected.

Facebook took it one step further, and allows you to add a photo to the advertisement, and lets you direct people to either your website, Facebook Application, or Facebook Page. I’ve had lots of luck Facebook Advertising.

Facebook Lexicon – If you only knew what people wanted so you could just give them that, you would make a million bucks, right?

Facebook Lexicon allows you to fairly in-depth market research. You can now see current trends in users activity and what their thinking about, talking about, or posting. How can this help you? Let’s say your running a Google Adwords campaign, or Facebook Advertising Campaign, it’s proven that by putting in the exact term that people are using, you have a higher click through rate! I even heard of a best-selling author picking his book title based on research of what people were discussing. He used Facebook Lexicon as one of his tools.

Facebook Connect – Facebook Connect allows users to simultaneously have the information and the users social actions from your website, also be posted to their Facebook account. It’s a win – win situation for both the user and yourself.

Let’s say for example you have a fitness website where people track their fitness goals, post their workout information, and so on. It would be a pretty strong bet to say that they have a good majority of their friends that are interested in the same thing. By logging in on your site, anything they post would also be posted to their Facebook account and distributed through their friends news feeds. In other words, if they posted on your site that they “Ran 6 miles and had a great workout”, this would also be posted to their friends’ profiles as well.

The user gets distribution of their actions in other places, and your website gets a free plug to all their friends. Facebook Connect is a  great solution for marketing of your website.

Facebook Share – Facebook Share does exactly what it says it does. It allows users to easily share information from your website, with all their friends on Facebook. Maybe you have a blog, an interesting article, or popular website. By adding Facebook Share to your site, Facebook account holders can very quickly post that article, story, or blog post to their Facebook account, and can do so without ever leaving your website.

The user is prompted to enter in a comment regarding their post, which is displayed to their friends, along with a link back to your article.

As you can tell, Facebook Marketing isn’t any one particular thing, but rather a combination of many things. It has free aspects, paid aspects, and viral opportunity. As you’ll discover from reading more on this site, there isn’t a right or wrong way to market with Facebook, but rather different ways. Facebook Marketing has potential for everyone.