Whether you are representing a business, product or service there are potentially limitless possibilities when it comes to marketing and advertising on Facebook. Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites on the web with hundreds of thousands of new users signing up each and every day. It is easy to see why many companies want a piece of this action. You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 corporation to market and advertise yourself on Facebook, or any other social networking site for that matter. Not only does Facebook offer varying degrees of cost for different forms of advertising, there are also dozens of creative ways you can use grassroots marketing and guerrilla tactics to get yourself seen on the network.

Facebook Pages for Businesses or Organizations

Facebook’s terms of service indicates that you are really only supposed to have one profile for yourself. You are not technically allowed to create extra profiles of fake people or even an extra profile for your business. The way around this red tape comes from the Facebook people themselves in the form of ‘pages’. Pages are much like profiles but they are meant for businesses, organizations, products, services or public figures such as actors or musicians. Pages are free and you can create as many of them as you want. Although as a page admin you can’t add people as friends, as a fan or page admin, you are able to suggest (promote) the page to your friends.

Facebook Groups

If you are already using Facebook, you are no doubt familiar with groups. Groups are much like forums that members can add discussions to and upload pictures. When you have a decent sized network of friends on Facebook you will get all kinds of ‘invites’ to join groups called “Let’s Start a World Record” or “15,000 people must join or Facebook will charge us money to use it”. These groups are usually given extravagant names to get lots of people to join and they usually in some way market a product or service. Sometimes they will use a celebrity persona or photos of attractive women just to get people to take a look.

Facebook Events

Anyone who has a free profile on Facebook is able to create events. Events can be a great way to market your business. You could host an event with a live band playing to promote your new launch of a product or even to spread the word about a new sale you are having. By promoting an event on Facebook you can invite your friends, and your friends can invite their friends. Facebook also allows attendees to RSVP and you can get a good idea of who will attend and who will not. This reduces a lot the risk involved with promotional events.If you have a little bit of computer programming know-how, or you are able to hire someone who does, creating a Facebook application can be an enormously effective way of promoting and marketing yourself on Facebook. Facebook allows anyone to develop applications and list them in the apps section of the site. When a user installs your application, they are usually asked to ‘tell their friends’ by inviting other users. If you can come up with a simple and fun little widget for profiles, your company could get exposure that you could not otherwise imagine through Facebook.

Applications

These are just a few of the ways you could use Facebook to market and advertise your business for, if you are willing to spend money and you have an advertising budget you can try Facebook’s numerous paid advertising tools. But with a little creativity and viral marketing knowledge, you could potentially expose your organization to hundreds of thousands of new users each day.

What you Need to Understand

Facebook is one of many new tools that businesses and individuals need to pay attention to and get involved in to promote concepts and ideas, products and services, events and causes.  Real people use the social media along with the search engines to make connections, seek help, gain insights, buy things and hire service companies.  If you wish to be found online the social media including Facebook can be an invaluable asset.  To get started and learn how you can integrate social media sites like Facebook into your online strategy, just contact us and we will be happy to help.