When you decide to use facebook as a means of advertising you have to consider the method in which you wanna do this and what the pro’s and con’s are of each method. Before we discuss these various methods, you have to understand that with every method you will need to be signed up with facebook, which means you will have to create a personal profile of yourself first.
So now you that have created your facebook profile; let’s discuss what options you have available.
1. Creating a profile for your business as a person.
Just like when you created you own profile on facebook (added a few friends or some people you may know), this can also be done for your business. This will bring your business across as a persona to other people you connect with and the advantages of this method are that, you can continuously update your status with various information related to your business such as promotions, events, specials, receive feedback, give feedback and more. You can also send messages to you ‘friends’ updating them on news of your business but this is where the limitation starts. Facebook knows that this is one of the most popular ways of using facebook to advertise and have since then reduced the number of friends you can have on facebook to 5000. Not only can have they done that but they have also limited the amount of people you can message to only 20 people at a single time. More importantly than the advantages are the potential risks involved in creating a profile for your business as a persona, most importantly is that facebook has the right to suspend your account because of this action. Thus all your hard work will be in vein.
2. Create a group for your business.
After you have created your own profile on facebook, you can also create a group on facebook for your business. Once the group is created, you can upload pictures of your business, upload videos, start discussions and you can invite people to join your group. The advantages of creating a group are that you can contact all members in one single message but beware that this means of advertising can be more annoying to members than well received. Receiving a message from groups have become more annoying than welcoming over the past few years, in fact most people tend to leave groups if they are bombarded with too much messages. Other disadvantages are that other than people looking at the wall on your group, messaging is the only means of communication. Another point to remember is that when you want to communicate to you members by message you are limited to only 5000 members. If your group has more than 5000 members, then the people who joined after 5000 will not be able to receive any updates from you.
3. Create a fan page for you business.
Creating fan pages has become the latest and best means of communication on facebook. Creating a fan page is easy to setup and you can also upload photo’s, videos, start discussions and more. Once created, you can invite your friends to join your fan page. You also receive weekly updates of your fan page, these updates include how many people have joined your fan page, how many people have had a look at your fan page and statistics such as who the people are in terms of age, sex, nationality and much more. Fan pages have advantages over groups in many ways, one being that when updating fans/members, you are not limited to any number of fans you can update and secondly you have the option of either updating via a news feed (this means that updates will appear in the news feeds of your fans) or you can message all fans. The disadvantage of updating via news feed is that if fans of your fan page are not logged in at the time of the update, they stand the chance of missing the update completely.
4. Advertising using facebook’s advertising program.
Using facebook’s advertising program allows you to have small ads appear on the pages of people’s profiles and you pay for the advertising each time a user clicks on your ad which then takes that user to your own website, fan page or group. The advantages of this method of advertising allows you to determine what your daily budget will be for any given day and that allows you to control your advertising, but the disadvantage of this method is that these ads are not targeted ads. This means that your ad about your artificial turf business can appear on a baby products page on facebook, thus the chances of someone showing interest in your ad is greatly reduced. For more information on targeted advertising using the internet, see our article on using Google to advertise your business.
Summary:
After all things considered, fan pages appear to hold the best results when wanting to use facebook to advertise your business but be aware that facebook is a time consuming social media website and that if you want a good result from growing your fan page, you will need to have lots of friends on facebook to spread the word. What I would suggest is that you find out from your employees who know more about facebook and how it works and then let your employees create your facebook fan page. Another way of increasing your fan page would be to get all employees of your business to join the fan page; this will then allow them to invite all their friends to join your fan page. You can also make your employees admins of your fan page which allows them to make changes as you need them to be made. Chances are that most of your employees are already on facebook and they probably are doing it at work, so why not use that to your advantage.
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