Promoting Your Business On Facebook

The book I read to research this post was How To Promote Your Business On Facebook by Tim Felmingham which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. The book is around 50 pages so quite short. It obviously about marketing your business on facebook and in that regard there isn’t a lot of new information. It is essential you use a business page as a personal page will be deleted by facebook if you use it for business. You can use some software called canva for creating a profile pic. A business page also gives you facebook insights which gives you marketing and statistical information regarding your business page which you don’t get with a personal one. There is a facility for marketing your business where you can target users of certain demographic and send adverts for a fee to those users. These demographics can be very specific with only a small number of people meeting the criteria or very large number and you probably want something in between. It can be cost per impression or cost per click. The latter being they visit your page. Most businesses promote on facebook and try to get the customer to visit their website to actually buy the item via a clicked on link. Some do the transaction on their facebook page. This is an interesting book that I do recommend.

Facebook Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Facebook: Facebook Marketing by Adam Richards which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is around 45 pages so is quite short. It tends to cover territory covered in other books and there isn’t a lot new here. It mostly looks at marketing for a business on facebook. You need a personal and business pages. You have to bear in mind you are the administrator for these pages and as such have to distribute information consistently. You can use hootsuite or sprout social to send out updates at specific times. Don’t forget there are over 800 million members and you have to stand out. One way is word of mouth always do the right thing by your customers and remember they are your ambassadors. Also send out messages promoting your company. You can pay with paypal for a secure transaction. It offers a certain amount of protection and sometimes gives refunds if it goes sour. It is mainly for use with sites like ebay. You can use a variety of criteria to find prospective customers. Things like location and online behavior. I did enjoy this book and do recommend it. There is better books out there though.

Facebook Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Facebook Marketing by John Tighe which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is only around 40 pages so is quite short. The book is essentially the transcript of an interview between John and Valerie Shoopman a facebook marketing expert. She used to use Google Adwords around 2007/2008 but it got too expensive per customer conversion and the competion for important keywords is tremendous driving the price up. Facebook marketing on the other hand is much cheaper with the ability to control customer demographics in incredible ways. One good feature for Google Adwords is if you are a non-profit you can get it subsidized.  Facebook Ads are particularly well suited to things like webinars and e-books where the initial cost per customer is very low and through targeting ads especially to the right demographics you can get a good percentage of buying customers. They recommend using Power Editor to do ads as it gives great control over the ad. John has a podcast series called Publish, Position, Profit where he interviews experts in business fields. You can subscribe to it on iTunes. I did quite enjoy this book and would recommend it

 

Twitter Marketing Book 19

Facebook is particularly ideal for smaller businesses as they tend to have a more personal. Interactions are the name of the game in this. You should never use a personal page to do business as Facebook objects to this and you can have your account suspended. Business pages come in a huge variety of types and you are bound to find one that suits your business. They can use Facebook applications and give you statistical information unlike personal pages. Never use sarcasm in your articles as some people will almost certainly take it the wrong way. Facebook Advertisements are more configurable in the USA version although Facebook intends rolling this out to other countries soon. There is a free statistical app for your facebook page at http://quantcast.com. http://surveymonkey.com lets you do surveys and they offer the first 10 questions for free. Google Keyword Search Tool gives you statistical information on keywords such as number of searches and is essential if you are running facebook ads. Google Insights gives you information on emerging trends. You should have separate personal and business pages and some companies have a separate business page for each product they sell. Involver offers several different free facebook applications you can run with your business page. E-commerce storefront offers a online shopping app that lets people place orders on your facebook page. It’s free as well. You should connect your facebook business page with other sites like twitter etc. It’s automated content that helps give visitors regular updated content. Joining some groups will provide free publicity and attract people to your page. On linkedin there are groups that specialize in members providing likes for each others business pages on facebook. It ceratinly saves buying likes although I don’t really recommend it. Facebookgrader.com will grade your facebook page in relation to others. It goes without saying there must be regularly updated and fresh content on your facebook pages. A good idea is to interview people in the same field. This is particularly good with self published authors who are often desperate to be promoted.

Twitter Marketing Book 18

In this and the following parts I’m going to look at some of the other social media options for promoting your business. First we are going to look at Facebook. Facebook campaigns can target a sample audience very selectively with endless criteria options. Generally there should be at least a thousand people on matching the criteria on Facebook or your being too selective and need to broaden it. Really it should be at least 10,000. You can pay as little as 30-40 cents per click. If running a campaign most of your orders from it should come in more or less instantly. Facebook unlike certain other sites which sometimes put the customers before the sellers does try and look after the sellers. They made $7 billion in advertising revenue in 2013 and you don’t get that without keeping them satisfied. You will normally place some kind of link in an ad and I’d suggest having a website and mobile website links. If someone only sees it on a mobile device and there is just a website and they click on it you are going to look rather foolish when it doesn’t work. You can buy ad space at cost per thousand impressions or cost per click. With cost per click there are suboptions. You might want them to buy something or just register at your website. Generally paying according to them buying stuff is more expensive. Some Facebook Business Pages have been known to buy likes. This might work initially in getting you started but is generally a bad idea. People have only got to look at your articles on your pages to see the number of comments etc which give the game away. Most people that go on Facebook don’t go on there to buy stuff and you must catch their interest by getting them to click on the link on the advert and then educate them about the product. You can also to get likes have something such as like this page to be entered into our competition to win whatever you decide to give away. To use facebook advertising you need to install a tracking cookie on your website. There is a kind of unofficial rule your customer will generally need to see or hear your company name 7 times before they will trust you enough to buy.

Twitter Marketing Book 17

There are some general rules that by and large apply to all social media accounts. Ideally you should always have a personal page and a separate business page. On your business page you should stay on track with posts connected to the product. You should never abuse the competition. You should never put anything like vacation photos on your business page. It’s just not professional. You should also steer clear of religion and politics. It alienates people and you are likely to offend and lose as many followers as you are likely to gain. You can do something like change the photos of your business establishment according to the weather. You should stay on topic about the product.
All social media sites seem to have the equivalent of the Facebook like button. With Google+ it is the +1 button and in Twitter there is favorites. Google+ integrates nicely with the Google range. It is the social component. Currently there is the innovative hangout where several of you can video chat. Further future improvements include a music stream feature via youtube where you can display music you like for others to listen to. Also a question and answer feature where you can ask a question and incorporate you favorite reply into a blog. Getting back to Twitter Bing and Google take into account your tweets and retweets when defining search results. Other sites like Facebook and Instagram are getting in on the act of using hash tags which are those messages with a # used to help people find tweets on a particular topic. They are particularly good with instagram because people can search photos which can be labelled.

 

Social Media Strategies

The book I read to research this post was Social Media: Dominating Strategies For Social Media Marketing by Michael Richards which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is only around 25 pages and looks at the major social networks and how you can promote your business on them. 1 in 4 or 1.73 billion are on social media and Facebook has around 1.1 billion. The potential in marketing to these people is enormous and this is something very exciting for the smaller company in particular. If you run adverts on a site like Facebook you have complete control over how much you spend. The advert just ceases to run once your limit is reached. It can also be targeted at certain people who meet a certain criteria like geographic location, age or sex etc. Most businesses use a product page on facebook for what they are offering. Actually this is a requirement on Facebook and you aren’t allowed to use a personal page to do business. A basic product page is free and one of the biggest differences between it and a personal page is you get likes rather than friends. Most businesses have a website and direct from social media to their website to actually do a transaction. If you promote your company on a blog a good idea if you post a photo is to also put it on social media. Most people do little more than glance at a post and it can say much more in a limited than a written post ever good. Of course you have to keep the types of content balanced. I did quite enjoy this book and think I would recommend it.

The Art Of Social Media

The book I read to research this post was The Art Of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki which is a very good book that I bought on kindle. This book is about getting the most out of social media and looks at the biggest sites, Google+, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook & Pinterest. It also looks a little at Tumblr which is a site ideal for reblogging things like photos and videos. This book is around 100 pages so is a fair length. Every social media site has a profile page and although I call myself Scratbag so I can talk you should pick a neutral screen name and preferably one without numbers. It is much more memorable. It is surprising how many people can be put off by a screen name. You can use Google Alerts to notify you of specific events like your screen name being mentioned on a social media site. Sprout Social & Hootsuite let you schedule posts to go out on social media. Tweetfeed does the same job with Twitter only. The Friends+Me service lets you publish Google+ posts on other platforms. You can also try and interview people like industry leaders and authors on Google+ Hangouts. Make sure they are a member of Google+ and know how to set it up. Hangouts are multiple connection video calls that can be set up on this site. They are frequently used by salespeople. 22Social lets you import Google+ Hangouts into Facebook where you can also view them. I did quite enjoy this book and I would recommend it.

Vine

The book I read to research this post was Vine In 10 Minutes Sams Teach Yourself by Michael Miller which is a very good book that I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. Vine is a free top selling video app for Android and iOS tablets and smartphones. It lets you shoot a 6 second video and the company has done research that has shown 6 seconds is the optimal length for a short video excerpt. They did tests with 4 seconds and 10 seconds. These videos are often looped with the trick being it has to start and stop with an identical shot. There is a social media site at http://vine.co . Note there is no com at the end. The company is owned by Twitter so of course it is quite simple to upload a video to facebook or twitter simply click the relevant box. These videos can be viewed on a computer simply go into twitter and click on the view media button. A video can be uploaded onto YouTube simply select options, then YouTube then fill in the fields then click publish. It is important to use hashtags in twitter and search terms on other sites so others find your videos. There is various special effects with in the app like a ghost button that lets you display 2 or more of the same object. You simply reshoot it after pressing the button to get a 2nd object. There is a stop motion feature. You can import video into your blog or website. It works best with wordpress or blogger. I did see a feature on yahoo where a lady ex-teaching assistant was making a 6 figure income shooting vines, doing comments and blogs with product placement. Companies paid her to feature their products. She was 22 and very pretty. I’m sure a lot of other people could do something similar. Some people do a story board with various 6 second clips each telling a different part of a story in sequence ie making a fried breakfast. I did really enjoy this book and would recommend it. Each chapter is about 10 minutes in length to read hence the title and it has about 24 chapters I think.

Social Media And Your Business

The book I read to research this post was Make Social Media Work For Your Business by Alex Stearn which is an excellent book that I read on kindle unlimited. This book looks at a wide variety of social media sites even including some like Vine and Instashare and looks at how you can promote your business. if you have a business web site most of your traffic will probably come via your corporate blog and social media. It is essential you use these tools for marketing. On sites like Facebook many companies neglect doing regular updates or comments thinking they haven’t brought much traffic in the past. You might not realize but this is essential because if someone visits your facebook business page they will probably assume you have gone out of business. At the very least you should be using Twitter and Facebook for marketing. If you use Twitter there is a useful tool at http://friendorfollow.com that lets you see at a glance who you are following and who is following you back. The average customer sees a mention of your company 7 times prior to making a purchase. With conventional advertising the cost of achieving this would be huge but with social media a lot of this can be done free. An ordinary facebook business page is free. There are many blog providers which is absolutely essential to your company where a basic blog is free leaving you just to buy a domain name. In social media sites many people prior to making a purchase will look at what their friends or followers like and often will do a search in a search engine for reviews. You must have an excellent customer service nowadays to make sure as many people as possible are happy with your products because especially on social media they tell their friends who in turn tell theirs potentially losing you a lot of business . This book is organized into sections on the various social media telling you how to use them and what 3rd party tools are available. I did thoroughly enjoy this book and would definitely recommend it. It is one of the best books on social media I have read and it is around 600 pages so is quite a substantial length.