Your initial step is to have a good look at Facebook’s promotion guide and determine what you want to achieve clearly before jumping into it. Subsequently, you would develop plan on how to achieve your goal and be willing to embark on the required efforts towards achieving your goal. Ensure that you are always timely, then be as simple as possible. It also pays off well to promote on your other marketing platforms or channels.

For novices just entering Facebook platform : where should be your starting point?
This is very important for beginners on Facebook. Your first step is to create a Facebook Fan or Place Page. Ensure that you define your audience clearly to enable you structure the right content and grow an editorial library. Take advantage of content that your audience is likely to find interesting and valuable – device a simple way to share the content and ultimately engage your audience.

How does a Place Page differ from a Fan Page?
For those who have a physical location where followers can check in, you can make it a Place Page, which can be mapped with a given address. For instance, if you run a concert show, a Place Page would be more suitable – the venue will be the address featured in the map.

What is the best approach to Facebook ads?
The key is to use keywords associated with your business and add images as well – in all, ensure that you make the entire ad engaging, fun as well as creative.

Facebook Like – What way can a visitor translate to a client or customer?
The best way to engage visitors consistently and substantially is to initiate techniques to integrate events, polls and notes into your business marketing. When you embark on meaningful posting, comments, and also liking, you are working towards engaging your audience and ultimately converting them to customers. The Like Button has been made more robust to help you send traffic to your link posts and stats. Events are also helpful in driving traffic back to your blogs.

Who can I learn from?
These are known to be leveraging Facebook power substantially – Starbucks, AT&T, Dunkin’ Donuts and a few others. They are well ranked when it comes to speed and harvesting their content to those who need it.

What is the technique for making content visible on Facebook? Newsfeed of course!
You can rank high for top and recent news. Embark on publishing multiple valuable content, and come up with a means of letting users contribute by responding with question or photo posting. Embark on activities that inspire interaction as well.

Finally, it does not require any technological skills to create satisfactory welcome pages, you can take advantage of some free apps out there. Also, get familiar with Facebook Insights and how you can use it to control metrics and tracking.

If you are just getting started newly to establish an online presence of your company on Facebook, you may get confused about a personal profile, a group and a page. It is common for new users to mistake personal profile for Facebook page. And some people would start a group when a page would have been better off.

Let’s take a quick look at the distinction between these three.

A personal profile refers to your personal Facebook account. In other words, a profile account represents a real individual (according to Facebook rules) and not a company or its offerings. Most Facebook users have personal profile account and this is what they use in socializing with friends on Facebook platform.

It is common to see someone creating a personal profile account to promote a business – perhaps you’ve received a friend invitation from users such as “Metroville Autos” which represents a company’s name. Facebook’s terms of service is against using personal profile for business promotion – in fact, this kind of profile would eventually be deleted. Now, you can change a personal profile to a page if you are in the category of users mentioned above, Facebook has luckily included an option to achieve this.

However, bear in mind that you must first own a personal profile account on Facebook before you can create a group or Page. If you own or represent a company, it is better to limit ‘friends’ acceptance on your personal profile to only those you truly know. Here’s the major distinction, a personal profile is intended to be a more private outlet for basically ‘sharing’ with only those who you are familiar with, while the groups and pages are intended to take care of large number of people, which can include those you do not know.

Facebook Page: This is created to cater for brands, products, public officials and celebrities promotion/marketing. Using Facebook page, large number of users can ‘like’ the page and receive news and info update from the page administrator, and also embark on interaction with others who ‘liked’ the page. As a Facebook page administrator, whatever you post on the page would be featured in people’s profiles news stream – these are people who ‘liked’ your page. In essence, if the number of your likes is up to 15,000, whatever post you make on the page would be passed across to these 15,000 people. The post is featured on their news stream – but some may not likely see the post.

Facebook Group: Facebook pages have their own functions. However, they do not provide the same level of innovative marketing options that pages offer. You can decide to make page a private thing and restrict it to only closer-knit who are possibly members of an identifiable organization such as a social organization. A standout benefit of group is that the administrator can send bulk message to group members – this is a feature you won’t find with Facebook Page. However, Facebook page is still the best for a business.

It could be a stark reality that you have been employing social media techniques for quite a reasonable time, and that you have had little or no success with your entire effort and time. Do not rashly conclude that the method or network you are using is the problem. It could be that you are making one of the 6 common mistakes associated with the use of social media. These mistakes were identified by an Internet Marketing Guru recently.

Here are the top 6 deadly mistakes in using a social media.

1. Using inappropriate connections
   Be aware that generating a huge number of followers does not automatically mean that you are effectively reaching out to your targeted audience. This point is further proven when you get no response for the announcements you send out. A helpful way to build solid connections is to use Twitter directories. A good example of the Twitter directories to use is the Twellow; this feature searches for followers according to their profile description to assist you in enhancing your Twitter following with the right followers. It is also helpful to be part of LinkedIn and Facebook groups, so that you can get connected with other participants that have similar interests.
2. Concealing your social media presence
   You can hide your social media presence unintentionally by not publicizing it. Include social links on your website to promote your social networking profiles. Another way to promote your social networking profiles is by including your social links in your business cards, emails, as well as forum signatures.
3. Not sending the right message
   In a situation where you want to link your LinkedIn, FaceBook or Twitter profile with your blog or businesses on a particular subject, ensure that your updates are in line with your website’s topic. Those navigating from one to the other, may be possibly doing so to get further information about you, concerning the subject matter of those websites. Avoid posting haphazard updates, especially those that have unpleasant language or immaterial content such as ‘what you ate for breakfast’.
4. Employing social media profiles in link building
   Perhaps you are considering creating a social media profile just to garner backlinks to your website. You will be deceiving yourself by thinking that creating several social media accounts will automatically start yielding you benefits. You cannot experience any result without using them.
5. Embarking on activities that are measurable by ROI
   Always remember that a firm social media strategy will not automatically result in a measurable effect on your bottom line. When you concentrate on ROI, you will not benefit from helpful techniques for interacting or communicating with your fans. Social media is a tool that enables you to showcase excellent customer service; it also allows you to handle crises competently, and to connect with your fans with the aim of generating better improved loyalty to your brand.
6. Adhering to multiple social media rules
   The simple truth about rules of social media is that one size does not suit every person. Certain social media rules may not be applicable to followers in your industry or niche. A helpful way to ascertain what is applicable, is to emulate those who have achieved success using social media in the same subject area as yours. Spend quality time to analyze the steps and rules they applied.

Is it worth promoting your business on facebook?

The answer to the above question will depend on your personal business objectives and your ability to use this tool effectively. Firstly, you need to know that the original basis for the existence of Facebook is social networking. Therefore, it is basically a tool that enables individuals to share information and stay updated about recent happenings within their individual social circle. It could be the social circle of family & friends, a collection of contacts, people with common interest, or even network of professionals or business connections.

A pure business networking tool is LinkedIn.
Facebook is purely a social networking instrument. Therefore, if you must promote business with Facebook, you need to be careful how you do it so that you don’t irritate the original users.

To ascertain whether Facebook is suitable for your business, you need to analyse if there are interest groups and target audiences that have the potential of generating business for you. You may aim at generating business directly by offering your product or service to those using Facebook, or indirectly, by creating awareness for your brand, or generating sales feedback on your products and on yourself using the network.

Other online social networking sites do exist.
What comparison can you make between Facebook and these other social sites? Also, is it better to focus on one site or extend your tentacles to multiple networking websites?

Facebook leads over other social networking sites.
The age group of its users range from early-twenties and above. In fact, social networking scene is ruled by Facebook – only having a measure of competition from MySpace.
Facebook is focused more on sharing life events, keeping touch with friends and family and getting back with lost contacts. But professional circles and business connections are also popular on Facebook; however, you must understand that they are not part of the original purpose for the creation of Facebook, and therefore can generate issues if care is not taken when using it for other purposes. LinkedIn is completely devoted to professional and business connections and leads in this niche. However, the number of subscribers is low when compared to social networking websites in general.

Couple of questions you could ask yourself

• Can I realise my business objective by using social networking sites? If your answer to this question is a YES, then you can promote your business successfully using Facebook and other social network sites.

• What is the specific network that will best suit my specific business objective? The answer to this question is FACEBOOK. But yes, you must be creative and socially committed in order to achieve a good result with business marketing on Facebook.

We offer a facebook marketing service. We offer a number of facebook marketing alternatives, please visit our facebook marketing page for further information.