The Local Outsider

Yesterday all the major news websites announced that Facebook has passed Fox, Ebay and Amazon on its way to the respectable fifth place in the Top 50  U.S. web properties list. More and more small business owners and advertisers seem to understand the power of social media marketing and divert some of their attention and budgets towards this relatively new medium. However, many of us just don’t know how to approach these tools and how to utilize them best for our business. As an early adapter, I have joined Facebook almost immediately after it allowed general public access, but it was only around 18 months ago that I began to understand its power and to study its business capabilities.

Here are some initial tips to get you started:

1. Always Use a Real Profile Photo – The whole idea of social media is the building of relationship and “friendships” over the web. Your users and future customers want to see the person behind the username/brand. Your profile photo is the first contact point with your potential audience, and as such should be both representative and personal at the same time.
2. Always Be Interesting – people use Facebook on a daily (and even hourly) basis.  If you want to be always on your potential customers’ mind, make sure that you  update your status at least once a day (this is the  ’What’s on your mind?’ sentence in the top of the page). Make sure that you link to interesting content, provide important insights, connect to other similar friends etc. The more you appear on their wall the more they will remember you as an authority and a person to trust for interesting information. Of course, the rule of thumb here is to do everything in the right proportion in order not to be considered a spammer or a Persona non grata.
3. Use Facebook Groups – Facebook provides two main platforms to gather “fans” or “followers” (people who likes your product or your brand and want to be updated about it). I will talk about the Facebook Pages in the next point. Facebook Groups is a powerful tool to create a (guess what…) group of people, all interested in one cause/product/brand/issue. While your first instinct would be to go and establish a group for your brand, STOP! Do not forget that people nowadays are very much aware of any direct marketing attempt and usually will not cooperate. So, the right way to use groups, in my opinion, would be to organize a group around a non-commercial cause (such as “Job Search Tips”). This will increase your attractiveness towards users who may have never heard of your brand but still would like to get job search tips. to know more about groups I suggest the following post from Read Write Web.
4. Use Facebook Pages - Facebook Pages are what Facebook uses for business. This is where I recommend to introduce your brand. Here you can put your logo, your brand description and related commercial information. You can add “Fans” to your page and communicate with them through “Updates”. The secret here is to create discussions and conversations around your product/brand. The goal is to reach a situation where this page is running by itself – conversations and discussions are initiated by the users between themselves. This is a great tool to investigate what people have to say about your brand and to get first hand feedback without the need to conduct expensive focus group researches. Of course, it takes time to build such traction, but for this you have to be patient and follow the steps suggested on a daily basis to eventually succeed in reaching this goal.
5. The Three C’s: Content-Communicate-Community –  This is the modern replacement for the traditional marketing four P’s formula. Nowadays, if you don’t produce constant CONTENT, if you don’t COMMUNICATE it with right tools, and if you don’t create a COMMUNITY around your brand, reaching your target audience and selling them your product or services will become almost impossible.  So remember, create quality content, send it along the social media river and dont forget to gather around you community of fans or followers that will wait for your next content and more importantly – will be an avid advocate of your brand.
6. Cross-Collaboration – Once we thought that all the social media tools are competing with each other. We now see the next step of social media – a trend of cooperation and collaboration between almost all the social media websites. The most recent step in this direction is the release of Facebook’s Twitter App. What it actually means is that the social media tools allows you to post your content simultaneously in front of hundreds of millions of people with one click! So, make sure you have an account on Twitter (and don’t forget to follow me…), Linkedin, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, etc. It’s FREE and you won’t regret it.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Group or Facebook Page? A Quick Guide
2. 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page
3. Facebook Marketing – How to Use Facebook to Explode Your Traffic and Profits
4. Facebook Marketing 101
5. Marketing on Facebook – Why Market On This Social Networking Site?