I started out on Facebook just as almost everyone else did. I opened an account, started finding other friends on the site and start communicating with them mostly by – I guess you could call it – Blog posting as a lot of what Facebook is really about at its base is a social platform – a blog site.
I was starting an online business and my initial focus when getting going was to write some articles, publish them to get known and then build them into books and market them on Amazon-Kindle. I did not have much more of a strategy than that in the beginning – I had just always wanted to write and publish a book. A bucket list item.
As I began to delve in further into the world of Facebook – and this spans time – over the last couple of years in fact – I became aware of just how powerful this platform really is from a business and product marketing perspective. And I have learned a lot about the platform to date – yet I am constantly learning more things I can do on it to further my brand awareness and even close sales right on the platform itself. With this in mind, I want to share with you some ideas for using Facebook that you may not have thought of. Here is an initial list of ideas to get you started.
First, you must absolutely have a business page if you are trying to market or sell anything on the platform. This is your first step. Facebook frowns on you using your personal consumer site to do any business marketing – so get this done. An additional tip: Don’t limit yourself to just one business page – create several if you have different categories of things to sell. I am still working to build this all out myself but I have found the time to create a main business page for my website, an “Author” page for books I write, and a couple of pages for individual “business verticals” within my online business.
Why did I do this? It increases your ability to get found. People look for and follow business verticals through keyword searching. If you type for example “coloring books” into the Facebook search bar, your search will return: Coloring Book titled pages created by people, coloring book groups, people who use this keyword in their name and sub-title “about” lines, top posts and latest posts containing the keyword, videos that people have posted with the phrase in the titles, events relating to this phrase, etc. So creating business page verticals within your Facebook presence can be a very good idea.
Next tip – do a little research – use the Facebook search bar to check out different keyword phrases and when you find good ones that people actively search on – use them with associated hash tags in your business page posts to help people find you. Your “People Reached” numbers will go up.
Do you want to get people to your other online assets such as webpages? Start writing, posting and sharing Facebook “Notes” – basically here you are writing articles and posting them on Facebook. A couple very useful tips in this regard: Write the full “Blog Post” or “Article” on your web or blog site. Then, go to Facebook and in your “Note” write the blog/article summary and not the rest of it. Next, put a line in the Facebook post with a backlink to your web/blogsite complete article under some anchor text that says something like “Click Here to Read the Full Article”. You are now driving traffic back to your business site where you can use lead magnets to capture e-mail addresses and you can sell them all your business products and services – as a bonus benefit, this helps to increase your website presence in the eyes of popular search engines like Google.
Find and join niche targeted groups. Then when you post related articles, videos, advertisement blurbs, shareable content, etc. “Share” them to these groups. This extends your brand awareness to potentially tens of thousands of people interested in the same topics that you are marketing to.
Go under the “Manage Tabs” button on your business page and add the “Shop” button to your page. Now, you can setup and highlight some of your best-selling products on your Facebook business page and you can share these products in your online posts. When people click to learn more, you can direct them back to your website and shopping cart to buy them by “tagging” the product image. FYI, a window opens up when tagging so you can enter the URL of the webpage you want to direct them to.
Another tab option I recently discovered and really like is the “Services” tab. Here you can market your time and services offered to others. I have used this feature on my Facebook business pages and I point these pages directly back to my online time-booking system webpage that I have built into my business website – I love this feature. If you are looking to get consulting or “Freelancing” jobs, here is a great way to increase your exposure and have people find you and book your time.
Post videos to Facebook directly. Facebook likes sharing videos. Again, as you publish these to Facebook, be sure to craft your video titles so they contain good useable keyword phrases and don’t neglect the use of hash tags in your video description areas.
Take some time to explore the business pages of others in similar niches as yours and when you find popular ones, go under the “More” tab displayed just below or on their business page background image and then select the “Like as Your Page” button to link them back to your business page. Here’s what this does for you:
First, you can’t comment on another business page as your page unless you like it as your page first. When you do then comment on another page as your page, the post you create builds visibility for your business page so you can get more traffic to your own business. Lastly, you can start to see in your news feeds content published to that other page – helps you keep track of the goings on there and who is posting content to that page – and you never know, some of that content could useful to you.
In summary, keep at it – you can drive a lot of organic Facebook views to your website just by taking the time to explore and work Facebook with your posts, shares, group involvements, the use of hash tags in your posts, liking other business pages, commenting on other pages, opening your Facebook “Shop”, etc.
The increased business exposure you receive from this extra effort, will earn you dividends.
Online Marketing - Learning to Leverage the Organic Power of Facebook
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