Daniel Offer a partner in the popular desktop Facebook Chat Client , Chit Chat for Facebook, reveals the truth about Facebook as a Marketing Tool.
Many small businesses, perhaps including yours have spent vast amounts of resources trying to monetize traffic from Facebook. Perhaps, you’ve hired a firm to build Facebook fan pages or Facebook groups.
If so, it’s possible that your missing the point – and that traffic, if any derived from these pages, probably isn’t converting well, if at all.
Truth 1 – Facebook Fan pages and Facebook groups are an excellent method for virally improving brand awareness, value and loyalty.
Notice the keyword in the above truth – improving – meaning brand awareness, value and loyalty already exists at some level with the referred Facebook users. The fact is, if you are a small business and your brand isn’t very well known you may find it an uphill struggle with no reward to build up a Facebook group or Facebook fan page.
Moreover, if you are seeking to obtain new customers it probably doesn’t matter how many Facebook fans you have, or how big your Facebook group is. What matters is converting referrals into traffic to your website and then in turn converting that traffic.
A Facebook fan page should be considered as another tool in your marketing tool box to help build a long term relationship with existing customers.
A Facebook group, however, can be used to improve brand awareness, but unless you’re offering something truly unique or with a ‘buzz’ around it – it’s probably not going to be effective for you.
Direct Traffic or Indirect Traffic
The act of creating fan pages, or Facebook groups actually creates a barrier between referrals and potential new business. Moreover, Facebook groups aren’t even crawled by Google – thus not helping your search engine rankings.
There are better ways to get traffic directly from Facebook, for example – inviting past satisfied cliental to create wall posts, or posted items, status updates or private messages.
Truth 2 – For a small business on Facebook; posted items, wall posts, status updates and private messages sent from your customers as referrals to other Facebook users is much more effective as an advertising mechanism.
Whilst wall posts, status items or private messages from your customers may be too much of a technical barrier for you, or simply not feasible to induce– you can influence people to share a link on Facebook to a landing page.
Tips
- At the end of your sales page, you could have a Facebook Share button, for a Facebook user to share a confirmed purchase with their friends.
- After a period of time, invite users to write reviews about products purchased from you, once they have written them, invite them to share their review on Facebook with their friends
- Consider using a landing page specifically for Facebook and split test its effectiveness, keeping on improving it. A well written shared landing page can pay dividends.
- Consider using the title tag to notify other Facebook users of the item purchased e.g. “I’ve just purchased the Xbox 360 Premium from GameStoresDirect.com”
Word of Warning on Facebook Shares
Ensure that the Facebook share is an explicit opt-in; otherwise you may find that rather than gaining customers, you lose them – particularly if you are selling goods of a more sensitive nature.
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