How to Use Facebook as an Online Marketing Tool

As an online marketing and public relations tool nothing can beat Facebook. Started out as a social networking platform, the site today boasts of millions of users. Any message on Facebook goes viral in a few minutes. Here are some easy tips on how to use Facebook as an online marketing tool for your products and services:

# 1: Highlight your profile: Being proactive automatically optimizes your profile for search engines. Your presence on the Internet can be made more prominent with the help of your Facebook profile by:

• Posting messages on your wall every day with something interesting and thought-provoking.
• Checking statuses, comments, likes and sharing of friends and add your comments.
• Adding photo albums and videos as often as you can, including those of workshops, seminars, conferences that you have attended and/or organized.
• Keeping tagging your friends and fans in photos.
• Adding interesting photos of your vacations to add a sense of fun to your profile.

# 2: Use Fan Pages: Facebook provides Fan Pages specifically designed to highlight products, brands, business organizations, services and to promote celebrities. With this page you to invite public to become a fan follower and ask them to share images, videos, comments, discussions and status updates with their friend. The constant activity helps to optimize your profile for search engines.

# 3: Publicize an event: Facebook is a great public platform to announce an event like a seminar, conference or workshop that you are organizing. Just set your profile to “public” and the whole world will know what you are planning. Announce the topic of the event and invite suggestions/comments from your network.

# 4: Form a group: Use our Facebook profile to form a group. Mention the purpose of the group and if it is business-profit oriented, you will be surprised at the volume of response. This will help to create brand value and build the credibility of the company. Once the group is established, you can then communicate directly by sending messages into their Inbox.

# 5: Use targeted landing pages: Let’s say you are dealing in apparel for teenagers and adults. The two age groups will prefer different styles and brands. When a teenager is looking for jeans and tank top, the landing page must be more specific to the searcher’s needs. Having to scroll through irrelevant options is tedious. People looking for XXL garments should not have to wade through funky leather jackets before finding what they really want.

# 6: Use Facebook Marketplace: This is an app that facilitates people and businesses list out products and services for sale. The Marketplace app shows the most recent listings as part of your status update and not as a separate list that viewers may overlook. Your friends will see the items as a newsfeed. Now they can share the information with their own network of friends creating an exponential effect.

# 7: Reward fans: When you have fans who are regularly clicking like and share options against your status updates, images and videos, they are spreading your brand name across the global marketplace. Announce reward points with a cut off, at which stage you can offer freebies and discounts. This is a marketing strategy that actually works.

# 8: Announce a contest: Using Facebook to announce a contest with a prize for the winner will generate a lot of interest. Make the content interesting and challenging enough so that more people share the news. It will also encourage people to share the news with their friends, friends-of-friends, and so on…

Once these measures are implemented, you will find that Facebook is the most powerful online marketing tool. It is known to drive inbound traffic to a website and increase the conversion rate.