Use Facebook to Promote Your Business
According to data from comScore’s World Metrix service, Facebook, has gained millions of new users in Europe over the last year. But what is Facebook and how can it help your company?
Facebook is a social networking site where you add people to your list of ‘friends’ or ‘fans’. Once you have done this all of the people on your list can network with all of the people on everyone else’s. You can start groups and invite members and you can customise your profile to include information that you want to share with others. There are countless, entertaining (often annoying) applications that you can add and invite your friends to use.
You can send private or public messages to your ‘friends’ too and this can serve as a useful communication tool. There is also a powerful search tool which enables you to get in touch with people you may have lost contact with, or infact, with companies that you want to know more about.
Rather than ‘Google’ a company or individual, you can now ‘Facebook’ them, bearing in mind that all the info given will be entirely edited by them.
If you have teenagers who have lots of free time you might be impressed at the amount of their free time they do spend on Facebook!
The European Rise of Facebook
Facebook is huge and in February had 275 million global visitors. In Europe Facebook pushed for a wider audience and increased its visitors by 314% to 100million visitors in February 2009.
The average user spends 3hrs per month on the site and, of the 17 countries surveyed, Facebook took the number one social networking spot with 30.4% of minutes spent in the social networking category.
The countries who most visit Facebook were the UK (22.7m), France (12.4m) and Trukey (17.4m).
How can Facebook help my company?
Facebook can help companies in 2 main ways:
Advertising
Facebook is a free application but gets its revenue from advertising. It uses very targeted marketing information to enable advertisers to really direct their products to more receptive audiences. Facebook asks individuals information about themselves, enables them to join groups and clubs and download applications. All this information enables them to track individual profiles and filter the right ads to them.
For a company, this provides targeted behavioural marketing information that can produce productive results from an advertising campaign. The high volumes of visitors (Facebook boast that they have 200,000,000 active users) enhance the effect and a recent study has found that potential customers are very receptive to advertising when they are using social networking sites.
Advertisements can be paid for either by per click (CPC) or impression (CPM) and results can be monitored in order to adjust targets and improve performance.
Company Profile
Youe company can have a personal profile on Facebook. Lots of organisations, companies and notorious individuals have a Facebook account. McDonalds has over 1.8 million fans on Facebook. If that isn’t incentive enough, here are some reasons to join in:
- Everybody’s doing it – like people expect you to have a website, they will more than likely expect you to have a Facebook account in the very near future
- It provides a good way to communicate with the general public
- You can collect feedback from your potential customers
- Its Free
- Its easy to use and can be done in-house
- Its speedy – you can let people know instantly about any news that you may have
- It helps you create a large mailing list at very little cost
- It promotes your brand
- It allow visitors access to your webpages and promotions
Word of Caution
If you have a personal Facebook page you need to exercise caution in how you use it. If you are very open about the personal details of your life you need to think how that might impact on your business profile. And not just your own information but your friend’s and family’s is readily available to others.
August 3rd, 2009 at 5:52 pm
[...] Facebook is a social networking site that is increasing in popularity both in the UK and all over the world. This, combined with the way that it uses very target behavioural marketing techniques, makes it a very attractive prospect for companies wanting to advertise online. Done well, advertising with Facebook can be very successful. [...]