Important Guidelines for Facebook business Manager

 

SELLING Our Products in Facebook 

The first thing that you should realize is that Facebook is a social network site. This means that you cannot actively canvass for sales the way you would elsewhere. Yet, simply because there is such a large network out there, there are things that you can do to increase your sales using your social network.

To bring back the example of the launch of Call of Duty, the producers of the game started their marketing months before the launch of their product. They sent out coded messages to people who were big in the gaming world. This included not only die-hard Call of Duty fans, but also critics. The code had to be cracked, and when you did that, it gave the URL to a new game that was supposed to come out soon.

There was nothing about Call of Duty in this strategy at all, yet because the URL had short scenes from the game, most people knew that it had to be Call of Duty because it coincided with their release schedule. This led to a storm of activity with gamers discussing about the merits and demerits of the new game, and all this without any basic information regarding the actual game.

When the activity levels started to die down a carefully choreo￾graphed leak would send the gamers into another storm until finally when the game was actually released there was so much demand for it that it grossed $410 million on the day of its launch, an all time record, putting to shame high grossing movies like Harry Potter.

Most of this was done only using social media, and even if Face-book did not play any part in this, it still shows the potential that an innovative strategy can have on sales. In addition, all this would not have cost 1/100th of the cost of traditional marketing.

The producers were shrewd enough to use the strengths of such a network and the results are there for all to see. Of course, the product itself was a good one, and the previous editions of the same game were top sellers themselves, so the producers had a base from which to work.

The basic principles however do not change. There are a number of other companies that use their Facebook fan base to do beta testing. The advantage of being a fan of the orga-nization is that, you get to do free beta testing, and they get a discount when they do buy the product. This is a win-win situation for both the network as well as the company because their fan base will assure them of a minimum number of sales. The kind of strategy depends on the kind of product you have to sell, and you cannot very well do beta testing for a new landscape design, if that is what your company does. Yet, it gives you the oppor-tunity to try something really innovative, and the best part is that this is not expensive at all.

When Call of Duty had its beta testing, they had to rely on their fan base built over years but through their own network built at their own cost. Now, you have the opportunity to use an already existing network to try out your own unique marketing strategy and at little to no cost to you.

COMMUNITY PAGES

This is the reason why many manufacturers are wary of Facebook. Facebook launched their community pages in April 2010 and created a furor of complaints about how it was not only useless but was actually damaging for small business owners. Facebook has since gone out of its way to educate people on what exactly the community pages were and how it could be used.

The community pages is a feature that you can create in Face￾book, much like a forum or a blog. It is easy to set up and you can have your own community. While this may not be absolutely neces￾sary considering that Facebook in itself a networking place, a sepa￾rate community page gives many advantages.

When Facebook launched this initiative, it created a few hundred thousand community pages by default based on information they had about existing networks. Many businesses thought that this was not only pointless; it was an infringement because these pages were not created by them. These pages were, however, totally community driven, and while there were pages with as few as one or two fans, there were others with thousands.

While this left most businesses thinking that they had gotten the short end of the stick, over time these community pages actually started serving a useful purpose. Most of the more online perceptive companies employ a few people to search the net to gather informa-tion on what exactly is the public perception of the organization. While in the real world this is usually done using polls, it was much easier and cheaper to do so online. All one had to do was to monitor these community pages, or forums to know what was being said about the organization. If there were complaints, it did not take long to track these members down and mail them regarding their difficulty.

This was a huge opportunity for organizations that were willing to take the bull by the horns. While these forums were community driven, it gave organizations an existing framework where they could deal with customer service issues. This strategy is simple, yet effec-tive, and Google is a good example for how an organization can use these forums to their advantage.

When Google released their browser “Google Chrome” there were a number of issues with it. In fact, many critics said that it did not deserve the Google name. There were so many complaints about the browser that if you look back now, you would wonder how it survived the beta phase itself. Google tackled this in a unique way. They had a Google employee keep track of these forums and answer any complaints that came up. The effectiveness of this strategy can be discovered when you consider that the stable version of Chrome was launched in December 2008. By Jan 2011, it had garnered an 11% share in the browser market and was the third most widely used browser in the world, rapidly approaching Firefox's share of around 30%.

With the number of faults that the beta version had, this kind of growth is surprising. This is even more surprising considering that when the beta version was launched in Sep 2008 it hit 1% almost immediately. By October, however, this had dropped to 0.69% because of the number of issues it had. Yet, they have reached 11% in just two years. Most of this is because Google kept its ear to the ground, had employees tracking forums where the faults were discussed. In many cases if a solution was not possible a bug report was filed in the customer's stead and the link was posted back to the forum. This generated a lot of goodwill so many users continued to use Chrome because they were sure that people were working to sort out the issues.

Although these community pages are just another kind of a forum, the advantage this gives is that it is within the Facebook network. This means that all users get the advantage of being connected all the time.

USE FACEBOOK as an Advantage

There are a number of ways to do this. Being on Facebook is not an end in itself; it is only a means to an end. You should start looking at Facebook as a tool that you can use, and if you change your mind to think this way, you will start thinking of different and unique ways to use Facebook to your advantage.

For example, many top CRM tools can be quite expensive, but it is money that will have to be spent if you want to give your customers a good customer service experience. Yet, Facebook offers you the advantage it being used much like a CRM tool but is totally free to use.

It is also not as resource heavy in the sense that you do not need as much labor because of the way in which Facebook is designed.

While this is only an example, it shows how Facebook can be used in unique ways. There are several other ways in which Facebook can be used to maximize your business potential. Starting from the basic things that every SMB owner needs to do, we will discuss all these techniques in detail.

How to  CREATE a Personal Profile

While your company needs to have a company page, it is impera-tive that you as the owner should have their own profilen hat you can link with the company. This is important because of the way Face-book users behave.

One of the most common behavior patterns of most Facebook users is to check out the profile page of all their friends, and those that they are interested in. While your company may have its own profile page on Facebook, most people are aware that the company is just as good as its management is and so will be interested in finding out about the owner.

Facebook operates on a platform of total transparency and trust. This is why except for any portion of your profile that you purpose-fully keep hidden under different privacy settings, everything about you is open to public view. Most people do not have any problem with this, and most only make sure that they keep private informa-tion like home address, or telephone numbers hidden. If your company's is a stand alone page and does not link back to its owner, or top management, it sends out the wrong signals.

Facebook users want personal information. They would like to know if you are married; have kids, what your interests are, general information that however makes them feel that they understand you better, rather than just a one-liner saying that you are the owner/pro-prietor of a small business.

Not only that, but people that you link with on a personal level will be connected to your company as well, and those who come across your personal profile will be prompted to check out your company's home page too.

Even if this does not net you any business and there is no reason why this should not, it will at least increase the page views on your company's profile. Since Facebook is public, Google will rank your company's page based on how many clicks it gets internally on Face-book, meaning that you have another way of increasing your compa-ny's exposure on the net.

FACEBOOK NEWS FEED

This is one of the most useful things about Facebook for most SMB owners. Facebook has two different kinds of news feeds, one is a mini feed that is free to use and another that is the main news feed. You need to pay to use the main news feed or be willing to build an application for it, but the mini feed is free and works just as well if used properly. The mini feed is supposed to be a place where friends can find out what has happened with others in their network. When a Face-book user networks with you on any level, Facebook adds a mini feed to their profile that feeds back to you. When you publish anything, it is sent via this mini feed to your entire network, and if what you have to say is exciting, you can crawl across various networks getting expo￾sure in the hundreds of thousands in a matter of days. All feeds from a user's network is amalgamated into one home page that is the first page that comes up when they log in.

The kind of exposure that this gives is enormous because most people are interested in knowing what is happening within their network. Of course, with Facebook's preoccupation with spammers, it would not be a good idea to use this feature as a marketing ploy. Even if it is not stopped now, you will actually be shooting your foot in two ways. You will be causing people to leave your network in droves because they find that all you have to say is promoting some product or the other. All they have to do is to unsubscribe to your feed, and you have effectively lost your network even if they remain connected to you through other channels. You will also be bringing yourself to the notice of Facebook administrators, and if they shut down your account for spamming, you have lost months and maybe years of hard work for nothing.

However, it is still a good venue to pass along information. For example, if you sell software, and want to do a pre-launch beta testing for a new iPhone app, sending out a feed that Facebook users can use their logins to download the app is a great idea. Not only will people in your immediate network connect to try out the software, this news is sure to spread across other networks giving you huge numbers. In fact, you will have reached millions of iPhone users within a matter of days, and every Facebook user who has an iPhone is a potential candidate. Many people actually use this beta testing for two purposes.

One, to get feedback about bugs in their software, and second is that many out of these numbers who download the software to try it out do so to find out if it is useful to them. They are not doing it to give reviews, although there are a few who do that. Thus, if your soft-ware is good enough, most of these numbers will pay the conversion fee when you go online with it.

You may have to give a discount, but considering that you already have a specific number of users, you can afford to do this. Of course, if you do not give any discount, chances are that the next time you do any beta testing, the numbers will fall drastically.

This strategy will work for any sector you are in as long as the feed is designed in a unique way. The unfortunate thing is that you cannot afford to have deals like this often. Once or twice a year is about the maximum. Yet, it is deals like this that gives you the maximum exposure. Using a like strategy to bring your company to the notice of a large number of people is the idea. This is the baseline of all marketing, and using Facebook to do this is not only inexpensive, it takes only a couple of minutes to set up. As long as you have taken precautions to ensure that the increased traffic does not cause your site to crash, setting up the feed should take less than 10 minutes.

FACEBOOK GROUPS

Having your own groups section on Facebook has a number of advantages. You can have as many members as you like, and if people interested in what you have to say or are excited about your group in any way, your group can grow quickly. Stephen Colbert's group went from zero to one million in just under nine days. This shows the power of having groups, and while you may not be able to get so many people excited about your organi-zation, it is still a place where you can connect to your network and send out bits of information as many times during the day as you want.

Creating such a large group is not always easy, and unless you have something really compelling to say, you may not be able to create such a large network. This however does not preclude this option from the list of possibilities.

FACEBOOK PAGES

Facebook pages are a lot like Facebook Groups, but you get some extra advantages. This function was mostly created for small business owners who want to use Facebook to increase their company's profile on Facebook.

You get more screen space where you can include what you want, and you are able to customize it better using standard HTML or even flash. Although, some people feel that having a page on both Groups and Pages is not really necessary. Yet, this is another avenue, and you never know if one page will do better than another until you try and evaluate it.

NOTES AND PHOTOS

Everyone knows that Facebook is primarily a place where you can share what is happening with your life through photos. Few people use Facebook without uploading photos into their profile. Starting from one on their profile page, and going up to creating different albums for different events, Facebook is much better than any other application because it offers the ability to upload unlimited photos.

There are many people who use Facebook as a place where they store their photos. It is online and therefore available at any time, and there is no way that you are going to lose your information because it is all maintained by Facebook.

When it comes to business, photos are an even more powerful medium than the written word. You can have pictures of events that you had in your company, like a Christmas party, a day out with all the employees, or other function you want to show. You can even include pictures of your office building, but it is better to get everything with a casual setting than a professional one. The reason for this is that all said and done Facebook is a networking medium that you are using for your own business reasons. If you have only staid pictures, as is usually found on company brochures you will not get much mileage out of it.

The idea behind putting pictures in Facebook is to show what a fun place to work your organization is. It is to show how your whole company is like one big family, and while you earn money, you do not forget to enjoy life in the process. People appreciate the personal touch and more so in Facebook because they expect it.

Using the picture gallery as a place where you can upload photos of your products is really not a good idea. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it really does not say anything personal about you or your company apart from making you out to be a sort of person who is just using Facebook to market his products.

The second reason is that you can tag these photos. While photos of employees is not going to net you much gain because you will already be connected with them, there may be other photos with people outside your immediate network, like when you go to a busi￾ness meeting or outside function. When you “tag” these photos, that person will be notified, prompting them to come visit you, and if you are lucky join your network. If he or she is a businessperson both of you will profit by being part of the other person's network. This presupposes the notion that people you want to connect with are already in Facebook, but with Facebook showing the kind of rapid increase in new registrations that it is, they are either already there, or are planning to be.

MESSAGES

Messages are a way for you to contact people who are outside your network. In other networking sites, generally you need to be connected before you can start sending and receiving messages, but Facebook offers you the alternative of actually sending messages to people who are totally outside your network. This has a number of uses. For example, you can use it like an email to get in touch with people with whom you may other wise find it difficult to get in touch with. You can increase your network by getting in touch with people who have a large network of their own, but are totally unconnected to you to find out if you can connect with them. Just sending a friend request may not net you an answer, but if you message them directly, you may receive a positive response. You can even contact people and approach them directly about the service you are offering.

Facebook has done a lot of work to weed out spammers because this messaging facility was being used to send out spam messages. If you do so, Facebook will shut down your account, so you need to be careful about the number of messages that you send out to uncon-nected people from your account.

Yet, this is a powerful tool if you use it in the right manner. As long as you have a marketing strategy in place, you can find ways to use Facebook that will give you the same results, but with much lower costs.

FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE

The Facebook marketplace is a place where you can put up your advertisements. This is free, but if you overdo it, Facebook will once again penalize you because they have taken spammers seriously.

Having your account shut down for spamming is not good formyour company, especially if you have gone to a lot of trouble in building up your network.

The marketplace does not give you too much of a response, but if you are serious about something, coupling it with other applications that Facebook provides may give you a lot of dividends. The advan-tage of Facebook over other places like Craigslist is that everything ties into your Facebook account.

Thus, if you want to hire more people, this may be a good option because people who come to you through your marketplace ad will already have checked out your company profile and will apply because they think that it is a good fit for them.

In the same way if you are offering a limited time offer on your products, although you will use other Facebook apps to let this infor-mation out, having it posted in the marketplace ensures that even people who are not connected with your network can come and take a look.

If your offer is good, it is sure to make its way into other networks, giving you that much more exposure for your business while at the same time, not having cost you anything to set up the entire campaign.