Facebook and Social Media – The Next Marketing Opportunity
Marketing as an activity is all about reaching the right customers with the right products, and the result sought is delighted customers who are more than willing to open their purses wide enough to boost your revenues. For many years, marketers stalked their target customers through various means and by trying to get their message across to spread awareness about their wares.
Traditional Means of Communication
Traditionally, marketing communications were conducted via print, broadcast and such traditional media through disruptive advertising, where advertisements appear in between the content of interest for the customer.
Traditional media does give a large reach to a marketer with its programming of mass appeal. However, the wastage is equally high, since a large portion of the audience would belong to a different segment than the one that is to be targeted by the marketer.
Enter Social Media and the Internet
The revolution stirred by the internet as a medium took place because of the fact that it is highly personalized and provides more content on-demand than any other available medium. Social sites proliferated far and wide in their usage for a few simple reasons:
The power to create and distribute content is equally available to every user, irrespective of him/her being a customer or a marketer. In the earlier forms of media, that power rested with the editorial staff of the channel or the advertiser, but hardly ever with the user.
The medium is completely personalized, and a user can create or join groups and further create content based on what he/she likes.
Opinions are free and fair. This is one reason why social media is of utmost concern to marketers, since buying decisions are no more influenced as much by advertisements. The traditional word-of-mouth marketing approach has grown leaps and bounds on social networks.
Facebook – At the Center of Social Media
With 500 million (and growing) unique users worldwide, Facebook is the number one social networking site in terms of activity and subscriptions. What started as a garage initiative by Mark Zuckerberg has now become the biggest phenomenon on the internet.
A user interface that allows for quick communication and the ability to create fan pages and groups at the click of a mouse button are what make Facebook extremely popular. Another important reason for its immense popularity is the wide variety of social applications that have been developed and made available within the Facebook environment.
These applications can allow users and friends to do joint activities like playing games that run endlessly, sharing photos, videos, and web links, and many more.
How does this help a marketer?
Traditionally, media plans were drawn to include television channels, publications, or any other media that can grab maximum eyeballs and effectively reach a selected target audience. The science of segmentation and targeting has become only more accurate in the case of social media.
Facebook provides a wide variety of avenues to communicate with the audience, which opens up an entirely different world of possibilities to have a fruitful dialogue with customers. Some of these methods used popularly by marketers are:
Advertising: The first opportunity, which is the most obvious one, is advertising on Facebook. The difference, however, is the fact that you can create your own advertisement in a matter of minutes and also specify the details of your target group in terms of demographics and types of discussions where you want your advertisement to appear.
Fan Pages: Facebook allows every brand, as well as individual users, to create fan pages for their favorite celebrities and their own homegrown businesses. Large brands have also created their official pages on Facebook that have a huge, immediate fan following around the world. The fan page has immense utility to convey first hand information about the brand and also to collect immediate and frank feedback from your customers.
Branded applications: One of the most effective ways to engage a user toward your brand is by creating an application; this could be a game or a contest, with your branding coming across subtly through it.
What makes Facebook even more exciting is the way it allows you to target your communication sharply just to the customer segment you want to attract. It also provides analytics and page insights that give good feedback and measurement on the activity done.
The options provided by Facebook can be creatively explored and used judiciously for bringing about maximum benefits to any brand.
However, while doing all this, you need to be aware of the fact that customers have an equal say and have the ability to respond immediately to any of your actions with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Availing the service of a social media consultant to work out a social media strategy may be required so that your efforts will not be in vain.
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Do you own or operate your own website? With the rising popularity of the internet, there is a good chance that you do. A large number of internet users run their own personal websites, but others run their websites as a way to make money. Of course, any website owner wishes to promote their online website, but those who rely on their websites for income are more willing to. Whichever type of website you have, did you know that you could help to promote it with online social networking websites?
If you are wondering how and why you should use social networking websites to promote your online website, you are not alone. A fairly large numbers of internet users aren’t even sure what social networking sites are or how they work. Online social networking websites are like online communities. They give internet users an easy and fairly safe way to come together. Many social networking websites are designed to make it easier for you to search for and make contact with other internet users, especially those that you have something in common with.
With a fairly large number of social networking websites, including MySpace, having over a millions users, there is a good chance that you could not only make new friends, but find internet users that would be interested in visiting your online website, especially if that website is your personal website. When joining an online networking community, you should be given your own profile page. On this page you could not only describe yourself, your online website. By mentioning what your personal online webpage is all about and providing a link, you should receive a number of new visitors.
As previously mentioned, social networking websites can benefit all website owners, but especially those who are looking to make a profit with their websites. This can be done one of two ways, by selling something or by relying on revenue from advertising. If you have a website that selling products or services, you may find it a little bit easier to use social networking sites to your advantage. This is because, if you wish, you could do product or service spotlights. Each day, week, or month, you could showcase one of the products or services that your website sells. This could either be done right on your profile page or on a blog page, which is provided by most social networking websites.
If you are using your online website to make money with advertising programs, such as affiliate programs or Google Adsense, you may need to approach social networking websites in a different matter. Since you will not necessarily have a particular product or service to focus on, you will need to approach these websites as if they were personal websites. If your website discusses being a dog owner, it may be a good idea to state your love for dogs in your profile. After doing so, it would be acceptable and not necessarily considered spam to add a link to your online website. As with all other types of online websites, social networking websites should help to increase the number of page views your website receives. In most cases, more page views mean more clicks which means money for you.
As you can easily see, there are a number of different ways that you can promote your online website, no matter what type of website you have or what you use it for. By keeping the above mentioned points in mind, you should be able to see an increase in your page views, in no time at all.
So, what kind of tools can you use to do social networking on Facebook? The short answer is, anything goes. Since there are so many things you can do with the site, you’d do best to consider it a blank slate.
Since you define your experience on the site and set your own goals, you basically want to choose the activities, applications, groups, and networks that will help enhance this experience.
Here are some ideas for using the site for social networking:

“ Inbox
You can send messages to other users and accept messages from your friends.
“ Groups
Joining and participating in groups is a great way to meet people.
“ Friends
Once you find someone you have something in common with, you can add them as a friend. Once they accept, you can do things like sharing photos, inviting them to participate in groups, and encouraging them to add certain applications.
“ Applications
There are a lot of different applications on the site. Each of them helps the user engage in social networking. You can play games, send the applications to each other, take quizzes, etc.
“ Share
The ultimate way to enjoy the site and use it for social networking is to share things with each other. This goes for applications, videos, and photos. You can also invite them to join groups, and use the site to take a look at the groups your friends are interested in.
“ News Feeds
This is another important social element of the site. It is through the feeds where you can see what your friends are up to. For example, if a friend added a certain application, you have the ability to check out what they added and decide if adding it is a good thing for you to do.
Those are just a few of the examples. The site has so many resources that it’s up to you to figure out how to use them for social networking. Just make sure you abide by the Terms of Use and conduct yourself in an ethical way while using the site.
A lot of people get in trouble for not using Facebook as ethically as they could. In fact, people who are part of social networking sites throughout the world continually abuse the privilege of being part of the site and end up using tactics that are less than ethical.
These are called black hat tactics, and they could result in your profile being banned. For lasting results, don’t use black hat techniques or anything related to misdirection.
On the internet, some people will use dubious tactics such as optimizing a site for a keyword that is really popular, but doesn’t even relate to the niche. Facebook has its own version of that.
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