How to Leverage Facebook for Inbound Marketing Success

As we continue our monthly theme of Inbound Marketing we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about Facebook. If you are on the web and do anything social networking related, you have probably heard of Facebook.

It started out as a social network for college students and then opened up to corporations and then to the general public. Over time they opened up their back-end and launched the F8 developers platform and the gold rush of games and all kinds of applications launched.

This was the catalyst for millions of people who never considered getting on a social network before. I will be that you probably have a Facebook profile and you might have even let your mom be your friend (if you are on Facebook you will get the joke). You can probably guess that the impact of Facebook is staggering but I will bet you don’t know the real size and reach of this social network that seems to be a place some people live and play (even while at work). Here are some basic stats from their site:

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 60 million status updates posted each day
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events created each month
• More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Yeah, that is pretty impressive isn’t it? This is why this is the new tool for marketers to leverage and create an outpost for their inbound marketing activities. While I could write a book on Facebook (and many people have) there are a few things that you should be familiar with as you explore Facebook and incorporate it into your inbound marketing strategy.

Facebook Groups

The concept of groups have been around for a long time and they are a basic way to gather people together. Groups have an advantage in that any group member can send out “bulk invites” to their friends which means that this is better for growth via viral marketing. You can message your members via a private message and you can host a discussion and use the wall like you can do with a fan page (more on fan pages in a minute). However, you can’t get statistics, use social ads (more on that in minute too) or create related events or invitations.

Bottom Line Use: Groups are generally better for hosting active discussions and getting attention quickly.

Fan Pages

Fan Pages are the most popular feature on Facebook because of a primary function that it has over any other function on Facebook – fan pages are visible to everyone, even unregistered vistors and are indexed by Google. Yes, that is sweet and fantastic for reputation management. Facebook pages also let you use vanity URLs – CAVEAT: These vanity URLs can only be set once and you can’t change it once you set it. The allow for inclusion of Facebook applications, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how you feel about Facebook apps. You can message all members via updates, get statistics, create events and promote the page with social ads.

So you have probably deduced that this is your home page on Facebook and people are creating pages for companies, products, celebrities and just about any brand or wanna-be brand that is looking to build a community around it.

Bottom Line Use: You can see that fan pages are fantastic for building long-term relationships with fans, readers, customers and anyone else that you want to connect with.

Ads

While advertising has been in social networks forever, it is how many social networks business models operate. However, with the growth of the F8 developer platform and the incredible growth of its use base it is really a self-contained ecosystem. This means that people can run ads within Facebook to advertise their pages (and any other web page) within Facebook.

The advantage of these “Social Ads” is that from your profile they know everything you let them know (age, gender, religion, interests, relationship status, location) which makes advertising super-accurate and with ongoing attention, better results than almost every other type of advertising.

Bringing it “Back to the Hub”

As you work through your inbound marketing strategy think about how this content outpost can help your business. This can bring people to your site and be the place they discover you and your brand. What I want to emphasize is that one tool is not better than the other and your organization could use all three of these or just one but at the very least I would recommend that you sign up for one and begin experimenting. But take note, you need to have dedicated resources to participate and update the site.

Are You Utilizing Facebook?

Are any of you readers out there using Facebook Groups, Fan Pages or Social Ads in your current social media strategy? We would love to hear your perspective and experiences to share with our readers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 11:00 am and is filed under Marketing, Search Marketing, small business, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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