Social Networking | A Social Marketing Strategy For Facebook

We've all heard the buzz about Facebook and if you've been around for a while you'll have heard how easy and how essential it is to have a social media marketing strategy for your company. After all, with over 300 million users on Facebook it must be easy to find a handful of customers almost each and every day, right? Wrong.

It's far from simple and you only have to speak to a few different people who have tried to build a successful marketing strategy on Facebook and you'll realise that the vast majority of marketers pushing their products on the Facebook platform are making few if any sales from their ever increasing activity. Why is this? In short, no clear marketing strategy. This article will provide you with the knowledge to develop a simple yet effective marketing strategy for Facebook. Here goes;

1. Branding

Know who you are, who you are not and where you are going with your business in the next five years (or at least where you plan to go) before starting out on Facebook. This will allow you to create a strong brand which tells your potential customers and business partners exactly who they are dealing with.

2. Networking

Decide on a plan to network in specific areas. Draw up a list of groups in your niche that you can find quickly each time you go onto Facebook in order to add value, comment on and share content and information within the group discussion board and network with other group members to build relationships and exchange ideas.

Find a few business pages of leaders within your industry and become a fan of the page. By doing this you will be able to see exactly what your competitors are up to on Facebook and also who else is a fan of your business rivals. In addition, you can also comment on updates made by the fan page administrator which will be seen by everyone who follows the page, offering you free advertising in the process.

Add relevant contacts to your list by carrying out a quick search of the Facebook platform to see what type of people are out there talking about your industry. This is really simple to do but very powerful; simply type in your chosen keyword or search term into the search tab at the top right hand side of your Facebook profile page, hit the search symbol and then work your way through the results column on the left hand side of the page,, providing you with search results from a range of different sources across the Facebook platform.

3. Sales

The final frontier in many ways and an increasingly difficult place to arrive at when using social networking sites to build your business but if you get this part right it can pay off big style. As the saying goes, if you don't ask, you don't get and Facebook marketing is no different. The best way to make a sale is to plan for it and with a little modification to your user profile you can set up a unique opt-in form on your profile page to offer people the chance to subscribe to more information from you about your product or service. If you want to go one better, then why not set up a Facebook page for your business and add a shopping cart facility to allow people to buy straight from your door, without ever having to leave the great land of Facebook?

Whatever you decide to do when marketing on Facebook for your business, remember the one rule of thumb; people don't frequent social networking sites to be sold to, so don't sell them on anything and you might be surprised how many sales you can actually make!