Online Gossiping
How it Can Grow Your Business
With a bit of time and effort – but no cash outlay – you could engage with 16,675,160 potential clients. Jess Joss of Insiteful Solutions assesses the potential of Facebook, which is fast becoming a pivotal business tool for forward-thinking companies.
In February 2004, Facebook was founded as a social network to help people communicate more efficiently with friends, family and co-workers. Today, Facebook represents 58.5% of the online population, and over half of all Canadians. Across the network, 50% of active users log in on any given day. An average user has 130 friends with whom they share comments, content and recommendations.
What do these stats mean for your business?
Offering free sign-up and an opportunity for users to interact in a trusted environment with people and companies they know, Facebook currently has 515,617,460 million active users. Collectively, users spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
Some could already be loyal clients, while many others may be your future customers.
In Canada, all ages engage with Facebook, to various levels, and there is no gender divide: 54% of Canadian members are female. While many regard Facebook as a tool mainly for teenagers, only 9.3% of young Canadians aged 14 to 17 are registered. A quarter of all Canadian Facebook users are between 18 and 25 years old. The largest group, at 26%, is between 25 and 34 years old, and while they may still think of themselves as teenagers, they have moved on in chronology and buying power.
Seventeen percent of Canadian Facebook users are 35 to 44 years old, and enthusiasts between 45 and 54 years of age account for 12%. Collectively, Facebook members who are 55 years of age and older account for 9.5% of Canadian users.
Does your target market fall into any of those categories?
Very likely – which means Facebook offers your company a viable marketing opportunity.
However, one fallacy about Facebook, beyond the impression that it is only used by gossiping teenagers, is that it is irrelevant for business-to-business focused companies. That is not true – for several reasons.
First, many people working and making decisions within organizations are likely to be Facebook members. Using the search feature within Facebook, they can search for companies, topics and services, and find company pages related to their interests.
Secondly, when a company creates a page on Facebook, the page defaults to a public setting, making the information available to people external to Facebook. The pages can also be indexed by search engines such as Google to supplement your corporate search engine optimization campaign.
Getting started
The first step to engaging potential clients and customers through Facebook is to create a page for your company. While people create profiles and have friends, firms set up pages and have fans. Populate your page with information about your products and services, contact information, a blurb about your Facebook page and the type of information you will be sharing (i.e. Facebook-only discounts, or early product releases), and a profile picture which might be your logo, or something iconic that represents your business.
Publishing your firm’s fan page only requires a few simple steps, but building an engaging page is an ongoing task.
Here are a few tips to help you create your fan page:
1. Choose a name with which customers can identify: the name of your business, and if you have multiple locations, the city for which the page is set up, is a logical start.
2. Create a ‘vanity url’ to reserve your company name and protect your brand. Go to Facebook.com/username
3. Provide details about your products, services and philosophies in your Info Section. Use keywords people would be likely to use in search engines.
4. Give your Facebook fans some exclusive content (promotions, information and soliciting feedback) to make it worth their while to be your fan. When someone becomes a fan, that shows up in their profile to all of their friends, thus putting your company in front of more eyeballs.
On your company page, you can effectively engage people with interesting content posted on your company ‘wall’, through photos and videos that your demographic will want to see or share, and through two-way conversations, by responding to customer questions and comments. More advanced users can also create custom tabs, Facebook application and e-commerce interfaces.
Drawing them in
When promoting your Facebook page, consider these simple steps to help draw people to your new page:
1. Link to your Facebook page from your website, blog, social media profiles and in email signatures.
2. Email your opt-in information to your email list to announce your page.
3. Write a blog post about your Facebook page and the added value available there.
4. Cross-promote with a related business and an invitation to their Facebook fans.
5. Advertise your new page using Facebook ads (a pay-per-click ad model).
6. Advertise your page on major search engines, such as Google, AdWords, etc, to drive people to your new page.
Remember, to create an engaging page, share something of value - not pure self-promotion, keep your page engaging, current and relevant, and interact and respond to customers and potential clients who make comments.
So does it really work?
A recently published survey of over 1900 marketers focused on their use of social media to grow their businesses. The results are thought-provoking:
• 87% said Facebook was an extremely effective tool of choice, just behind Twitter.
• Facebook was the first choice for those getting started in social media marketing, and second choice for those who have been using social media for many months or years.
• Facebook is used by 83% of the business-to-business (B2B) companies surveyed and by 92% of business-to-consumer (B2C) companies in the study.
• 80.1% of B2C companies plan to increase their Facebook efforts, with 85.4% of large businesses also intending to increase their Facebook activities.
Given that your potential clients and customers are likely online, and using Facebook, isn’t it time that your company was, too?
Jess Joss is a partner at Insiteful Solutions, a company of online result specialists. For more information, visit www.insitefulweb.com, or contact Jess at 905-947-8235.
2600 John Street, Unit 207, Markham, ON L3R 3W3 T: 905.475.5222 F: 905.475.6369
