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Taking advantage of Social Media Channels: FACEBOOK

10 May 2009 No Comments

When bloggers start their voyage into the world of online marketing they usually start from the beginning: what is a blog, what is Google AdSense, AdWords, organic positioning, SERP, blah blah blah… (I’ll get to that as well). Although the past is good to know, the now and tomorrow is much more exciting and relevant, especially that online marketing changes in a matter of a blink. So, I’ll start with Social Media and it’s effect on online marketing.

Currently the majority of online professionals focus on three main areas: SEO, SEM, and - to a lesser degree - Web Analytics. No weight had been given to the growing phenomenon known as Social Media (or more generally Social Web) - the phenomenon of socializing online through user generated content on services such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter. However, this oversight by the marketing community is quickly changing as it is becoming evident that referrals from these user-generated sites are more valuable than any other types of marketing gimmicks, and they are FREE.

Facebook - What is it
Facebook, with its two hundred million users is the largest social networking service in the world and also the most attractive. Its stickiness lies in the ease of use with which users can communicate with each other. Most communication is irrelevant information - Saturday night date type stories - but there is a large portion of user posts about interesting events, pages and products online.

How does marketing on Facebook wokr?
A user posting a link to your site on their Facebook page is in fact recommending it to all their friends - that’s the equivalent to a satisfied girl coming out of a hair salon and referring the place and the specific hairdresser to her friend. In other words… it’s the word-of-mouth advertising, the most valuable of them all. The Power of this type of marketing lies in the fact that we typically connect with people that have similar interests, come from similar social backgrounds and demographics; therefore, one single link on your Facebook page immediately targets a large and carefully selected audience.

Where do I start?
Adding a Facebook button is simply a matter of pasting in a simple code - all you must remember is to change the bold < url > to the actual address. The following code places the icon and a text link:
<script>function fbs_click()
{u=location.href;t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer‘,’toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return
false;}</script><style> html .fb_share_link { padding:2px 0 0 20px;
height:16px; background:url(http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/images/share/facebook_share_icon.gif?8:26981)
no-repeat top left; }</style><a
href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=< url >” onclick=”return
fbs_click()” target=”_blank” class=”fb_share_link”>Share this link on Facebook</a>

Always try to make sure that the link looks attractive and encouraging.

Who is this for?

Let’s not fool ourselves - not all our great ideas will be equally linked to on Facebook. The greatest chance for success will have events, services and products which closely relate to a certain lifestyle. Much lower success rate will have links that deal with career issues. An extreme example: a producer of large boilers should not worry himself about joining any social networking sites. It’s important to take into consideration the demographic of the Facebook crowd: young middle class people, relatively wealthy.

If you would like to share your ideas on the issue of social web marketing or specifically have comments about this post please feel free to start a discussion. This is a topic worth expanding on.

Update:

Just found this on WJS:

“…mobile and social media will enjoy the biggest spending gains in interactive — increasing nearly 70% to $391 million and almost 60% to $716 million, respectively, in 2009.”

60% increase in social media advertising spending. Now do you understand why I chose to start with the now and future rather than from the beginning?