Marketing On Facebook.
What a trendy marketing term! Now many companies, big and small, are already paying serious attention and putting effort to make facebook work for them. Given the recent facebook statistic, which shows that people in U.S. are spending 7 hours on Facebook per month, business owners are trying to find ways to “get their name out” on facebook and, hopefully, want to do branding and make some money at the same time through this #1 social networking community. And it seems that, there are already some companies make some good profit using facebook, and I believe that in the near future, there will be more business owner making money over there.
Business owners are getting lose
However, while people are focusing on Facebook, or LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, business owners seems “getting lost”. It seems that many business owners are doing this facebook stuff “because other people are doing it”. They spend a lot of money to create a fancy, good-looking fan page. Adding some functions, cheat and tricks in order for people to “like” them, or even instruct their company staff to “like” their company fan page!
What I suggest, and not suggest
Well, personally I don’t resist on doing marketing on Facebook. And on the contrary, I suggest SME and even big company use Facebook to get in touch and building relationship with their prospects and customers. However, what I don’t suggest is that business owners are paying too much attention to “promoting their fan page”, “making their fan page good-looking” and ignore the basic of their business: to build good relationship with customers and have them buying from you again and again, while at the same time have them spread the word for you.
In other words, social media sites, like Facebook, are just tools to help you to get in touch with your customers. Your ultimate target in your business is to create massive value for your customers and make money by doing this.
Under this concept, the question become: how to build relationship with people on Facebook in order to get more business?
How to build relationship with people on Facebook?
Building relationship with people on facebook is similar to doing it with your list. People who “Like” your fan page simply because this page can help them in some ways: e.g. have interesting, latest information, or useful tips and tricks. You can give them some result in advance by giving good tips regularly and posting it on facebook. The key here is “doing it regularly”. Your tip should be useful and contain no selling. It is because people on Facebook are, generally speaking, friends. If you don’t like being sold by your friends regularly, do not do that to your facebook fan also.
However, I will also suggest you to transfer your fans on your fan page to your email list. It is because building relationship by email is much more effective then on facebook. The reason is that their personal email address can be seen as their virtual “home”. If you can communicate with them in email, it means you are invited to their virtual “home” and you can build a more close relationship with them.
I have a lot of friends now, but what about my business?
Now it is time to leverage your friendship by selling them something. Since you have good relationship with them, they know that you always give them good stuff and best value, they will listen to everything you said and buy from you.
But wait, why can’t I sell them something first but sell them so late? The reason is this: most people will not buy at the first time from other stranger, but they will buy the same stuff because their friends told them to do so. Here the keyword is relationship. Having a good relationship means that you will not hassle them by selling them something since you are good to them at first. It is also ok if they don’t buy from you. It may be because this is not their best time to buy, or this is not for them, or for whatever reason. But the point is, given that you have built a “you like them, they like you” relationship, they will do what you want them to do because you treat them well at first.
To conclude, facebook is similar to other medias like direct mail, email or twitter. They are just tool to help you learn more about your customer. If you are paying too much attention to the “tool” and forgot the basic of your business, you will fail eventually even if you have the best, most fancy, full of functions and features fan page in the world.
If you need someone to help you to achieve remarkable result in facebook marketing, send us a message or drop me an email to [email protected], we can discuss about it.