Sunday, October 13, 2013

Engaging and advertising on Facebook 101




















For small business owners, using social media as a means to grow their business may seem overwhelming. They may be wondering “where is the best place to start?” That place is Facebook.

Facebook allows users to find friends, personalize a profile page with photos and status updates and connect with brands they love. In turn, Facebook allows brands to connect with its customers, steer the conversation about their business and target advertising very specifically.

The social network famously founded by Mark Zuckerberg and friends in 2004 at Harvard (famously dramatized in 2010's "The Social Network") has gone from 1 million monthly active users at the end of its first year in existence to 1.15 billion active users as of June 2013. With monthly user growth of 115,000 percent in just under a decade, it’s safe to say that a good chunk of a business’ prospective customers are active on Facebook.

Back in its early days, Facebook was thefacebook.com and it was only open to students on select college campuses. In September 2006, the membership flood gates opened and anyone with a valid email address was allowed to join. Back then, opening up Facebook was decried by many college students (myself among them), but it ended up being a good move for the social network, doubling its base from 6 million users in December 2005 to 12 million users in December 2006.

Facebook for everyone, everywhere
These days, according to Business Insider, 67 percent of people in the U.S. who use the Internet are on Facebook. Though the younger age brackets still have a larger presence on the network, its reach is expanding. Since the end of 2012, the 45 to 54-year-old age bracket has seen 46 percent growth on Facebook.

Facebook users are taking the show on the road, as 819 million monthly users accessed its mobile products as of June 30, 2013. Business Insider also reports that the Facebook app is the No. 1 social media smartphone app. If a U.S. business is looking to expand its brand internationally, there's also the potential of reaching more people with Facebook: 86 percent of users who log in to Facebook are from outside of the States.

So, if more than a billion people from everywhere in the world access each month Facebook from a desktop or an app, it just makes good business sense for local, regional and national brands to be a part of the conversation on Facebook.

How to get started
The first step in building a business presence on Facebook is to create a page. Page administrators will want to choose engaging photos that are the correct dimensions for the page’s cover photo and profile picture. Filling out the page’s About and Location information will make it much easier for users to find that business on Facebook’s Nearby feature, thus making it easier for consumers to connect with that business on mobile Facebook when they’re out and about. For a basic tutorial on how to build a page, click here. For a more advanced look, watch the video below:



Many businesses and public figures started out in Facebook’s early days by making profiles that a user could request to be friends with, just like a regular personal profile. However, many businesses ditched these friend-type profiles when Facebook Pages launched in 2007, making it much easier for users to differentiate between business pages, public figure pages and personal profiles.

To support a brand’s page making and posting efforts, Facebook has created several different informational pages, including Facebook Business and Facebook Marketing. These pages offer tips on how to manage business pages, show how these pages will appear in mobile version and how to leverage Facebook’s advertising capabilities.

Expanding reach with Facebook ads
According to Facebook Business, there are 1 million businesses actively advertising on the network. For a long time, Facebook shied away from ads, not wanting to ruin the user experience. In order to keep the site free to users, ads had to come along.

Facebook’s approach to ads is more refined for businesses, targeting the consumers who are most likely to buy that product or service. While keeping user identity private, Facebook sells and displays ads based on “demographic factors such as location, age, gender, education, work history and the interests people have chosen to share on Facebook.” Citing a 2012 Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings report, Facebook says its ads reach 91 percent of its intended targets.

Ads, which can appear in the site's right rail or as a sponsored story in the news feed, can be crafted based on what a business wants to accomplish. See the examples of sponsored stories below: a business can drive likes for its page, encourage users to share an offer, buy an item or download their app or program.

In fact, Facebook wants to do even more of the latter; drive users to apps they already have. Facebook ads of this nature will appear in a user's news feed and drive that user to apps they already have installed on their phone.

Best of all, Facebook's advertising offers instant feedback through analytics, allowing social media marketers to alter their campaigns on the fly. You can get more details on analytics in Facebook's Ad Manager Guide, or read this blog from my colleague Janis Butkevics.

BONUS: Facebook plays nice with others

Twitter and Facebook updates can be synched together. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012, so a business can share its filtered Instagram photo posts on Facebook. Content a business pins on Pinterest can be blasted out to the News Feed. A Facebook profile can be linked to a Klout account so a business' "moments" can be measured. Also, Facebook Home for Android will allow Tumblr, Pinterest, Flickr and Instagram content to be shown on its lock screen.

I'd hate to play on the "everyone's doing it" mentality when it comes to Facebook, but it's so true. Numbers don't lie, and those numbers show a whole lot of people are on Facebook. So what is your business waiting for? Start advertising to targeted customers without delay!

Not in the mood for all that reading? Check out the Prezi below:

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