Facebook marketing small business owners
STORY OF FACEBOOK
In the fall of 2003, Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra were on the lookout for a web developer who could bring to life an idea the three say Divya first had in 2002: a social network for Harvard students and alumni. The site was to be called HarvardConnections.com. The three had been paying Victor Gao, another Harvard student, to do coding for the site, but at the beginning of the fall term, Victor begged off the project. Victor suggested his own replacement: Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore from Dobbs Ferry, New York. Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons. The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard’s Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness. After lawsuits and new partners, Zuckerberg would change the original name from Facebook to Facebook and change the way we communicate forever.
Facebook is the mainstream social media with over 900 million in personal and business networking tools becoming somewhat of a monopoly in social media. The history of Facebook is known well. With the production of the Social Network movie and college students study time being dwindled by procrastinating on Facebook, Facebook is the number one visited website in the world right now. Yet, how businesses use it is still a relatively new strategy. Questions about security settings are also constantly being changed by Facebook. Business objectives for Facebook include optimizing a fan page, finding target markets to engage with, engagement strategies, and groups. There are close to a billion people on Facebook, it’s a huge driver of traffic once you get the ball rolling. It won’t happen overnight but it’s worth putting in the time because you’ll eventually have a reliable major source of traffic to your website.
FACEBOOK STATISTICS
Active Users: Facebook: 1.3 billion
FACEBOOK PAGE
- Wall Posts: Facebook users can post content to a brand’s fan page. They can say good things, complaint, or talk about a recent experience they have, post photos straight, and other user-generated content about your brand.
- Comments: Comments are an opportunity to react to a wall post. Both you and your fans can comment. They are mini conversations spurred from the original post.
- Likes: The classic thumbs up! If someone “Likes” a wall post, this means they like the content of that post. This can also be translated to mean “I agree.”
- Recommendations: Install the Recommendations plugin, which will display personalized recommendations from other Facebook Users.
- News Feed: a feed of what Facebook calculates is the most relevant and important items occurring in your network. Your goal should be both to react to important items in your business’ News Feed and get your wall posts featured in others’ News Feeds.
- Cover image: Create an image using products and services you offer and your logo with Pixelmator.
- Events & Groups: Used for posting discussions and creating real-life events.
- Facebook Timeline: The user is now at the center of the Web experience with Facebook Timeline. Links are supplanted by likes. The Open Graph also uses Facebook Places as an important location-based marketing service. Partnerships with Bing gave the Open Graph greater influence in search results.
- Photos: Creative Commons images from Flickr and Photopin. You can also purchase inexpensive stock photos at iStockphoto, YayMicro, and Creative Commons.
- Custom Tabs: tabsite.com
- Schedule: You can schedule your posts below the time clock icon
Do market research in your industry by doing Site:Facebook.com “Your industry.”
You must first understand the Facebook Algorithm.
The Business Admin is the person who has purview into all activity taking place in Facebook media and account management. Identifying a Business Manager Admin is the first step to creating your Business Manager account. Projects are an easy way to organize Pages and ad accounts. You can set up a project for each client or functional team. When assigned as Page Moderator, team members can respond to and delete comments on the Page, send messages as the Page, create ads and view insights. The analyst permissions for an ad account are limited to viewing ad performance, which includes the ability to access reports.
One theme dominated the summit: Facebook wants the world to connect and engage.
This theme is evident in the new Timeline product, perhaps the biggest announcement to come out of F8. Timeline, which launched on Thursday, redefines the profile concept, helping users build a representation of their life story on Facebook. With Timeline, users can share what matters most to them on different levels of magnitude, highlighting both major milestones (such as birthdays or new jobs) and everyday activity.
A timeline will have a huge impact on marketers, as it launches a new class of applications focused on social expression and connection, increasing Facebook’s targeting capabilities. These new applications go beyond the “Like” and let users share what they are listening to, watching, and reading.
In the very near future, Media customers will be able to leverage these detailed forms of expression to deliver consumer initiated advertising through sponsored stories and units. Increased performance from sponsored stories and more information on consumer behavior and interests will only help advertisers create deeper, more meaningful connections between brand and consumer by engaging with users around the content they find important.
Here are a few more important updates from the F8 conference:
- New Open Graph enhancements allow consumers to sync Facebook with applications and share what they are “Reading” “Listening” or “Hiking,” –increasing the number of behaviors for advertisers to target against.
- Advertisers will be able to deliver sponsored stories against these actions and even carve up the segments for more precision. For example, they can promote to all “listens” from the band Coldplay.
- The new sponsored stories will only be generated from applications, but advertisers don’t need to own the app where the action takes place to target against the behavior.
- Facebook also updated the News Feed this week, changing how stories are presented to users. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm will stay play a major role in determining whether brand updates are seen, but sponsored stories can increase the likelihood of a brand message reaching a mass audience.