7 Ways to Use Facebook for Marketing

7 Ways to Use Facebook for Marketing

Facebook is still the overlord of social media sites and the first stop for friends to connect and share online. Facebook is not only a place for friends to gather, it has also evolved into a place where businesses sell themselves through interaction with customers and self-promotion.

Whether you’re a big corporation or a small local biz, Facebook is a powerful marketing tool – it’s a great space to keep customers informed, develop brand identity, and broaden your reach.

1. Making the Most of Your Facebook Business Page

Facebook pages are great free marketing tools for businesses. Through these pages, businesses can not only identify themselves by listing products or services, but also better understand their personality and characteristics by sharing links, images, and posts on customizable pages.

Your Facebook business page is a great place to develop your brand image and show humanity. On Facebook, you can take it easy – don’t be afraid to be fun.

Ultimately, you should consider what your key audiences want to see. As long as social media is connected to your business, you can share social media images, links, videos, and anything else, and your target audience will love it.

In addition to funny videos of dogs walking in small shoes, a shoe-making store may also publish an article on how to accurately measure the size of the foot, which insole is best for different foot pain situations, etc. Humor, educational resources, and posts about store updates are ideal.

2. Facebook Marketing: Classic Ads

Facebook offers Facebook ads in its own form of ads, which appear in the sidebar of the Facebook site. These classic advertisements are more specifically called “market advertisements”. They include headers with images, images, and click-through links to Facebook pages, Facebook applications, or external websites.

Implementing Facebook ads in your Facebook marketing strategy is one possible technique for increasing like rates or increasing website click-through rates.

Facebook marketing features include:

• Demographic targeting by Facebook user data on age, location, education, and interests.
• The ability to set ad budgets.
• Ad testing, in which multiple ad versions can be run simultaneously in order to compare ad designs and setup.
• Built-in ad performance measurement tools.

Facebook doesn’t release information about their ad CTRs, so it’s difficult to know how successful Facebook ads really are. In our Facebook Ads vs Google Display Ads Infographic, we found that Facebook ads generally have a CTR of 0.051%, and an average CPC of $0.80; however, a business’s Facebook marketingcost can vary a lot depending on the targeting options set and competition.

Using Facebook ads to add your “likes” can be very beneficial-once users like your page, they will actually become followers of your business page, and your posts will appear in their Facebook news feed.

This will lead to more users interacting with you and your brand, creating relationships that may eventually translate into conversions.

3. Hosting Facebook Contests

Running Facebook contests, sweepstakes, or promotions is another Facebook marketing tactic that can increase fans and brand awareness.

When conducting a Facebook contest, please note that you cannot run a contest through Facebook itself (this means you cannot ask for a favorite entry, let people write answers in comments, etc.). Businesses must use a third-party application to create their Facebook contest and then direct users from their Facebook page to the application.

There are many paid tools to help you with this task, and some free tools. Many third-party Facebook contest apps offer free versions, but your options for them are limited.

4. Facebook Promoted Posts

With Facebook recommended posts, Facebook page owners can pay a unified fee to make their single Facebook post reach a certain number of users, thereby increasing the coverage and impressions of a particular post.

Some businesses ask-why do I have to pay to make sure my followers can see my posts? If users like my page, they should always see my post on the news source, don’t they? The answer to this question is no, because it assumes that users spend every waking moment in their lives on Facebook news feeds.

If a fan of yours happens to be looking at their news feed when you post your story, they are likely to see it, but even then there is no guarantee if their news feed is swamped by other posts. That’s where Promoted Posts comes in – it ups your chances of being seen on a user’s news feed. Facebook Promoted Posts are shown to existing fans, with an added option to reach friends of fans.

Promoted posts are easy to set up-just click the button below any page post. Although the flat rate simplifies the process, Promoted Posts lacks the targeting options provided by other Facebook ads.

5. Sponsored Stories

Sponsored Stories are a type of Facebook ad that shows a user’s interactions, such as a Facebook like, to the user’s friends.

Sponsored Stories seeks to capitalize on the “word of mouth” marketing concept. If a user sees that three of his friends like a certain page, he is more inclined to pay attention. The goal of Sponsored Stories is to have a user take the same action as their friends. Advertisers can choose to show friends “likes” if they want more page likes, show friends who have “claimed this offer” if a business wants more users to claim offers, etc.

While the action performed by a friend liking a page or claiming an offer is automatically posted in a user’s news feed, these posts easily get overlooked. Sponsored Stories get preferred positioning, capable of appearing in news feeds and the right side bar. Sponsored Stories is also the only ad format available on mobile devices.

Sponsored Stories don’t only apply to likes or offers – they can be used with any Facebook Open Graph app. If a friend has just installed Scramble With Friends on Facebook, Sponsored Stories can show users that their friend has just played the Scramble game, with an invite to “challenge them,” “play with them,” or any similar variation.

Facebook claims that Sponsored Stories have 46% higher CTRs and 20% lower CPCs than regular Facebook ads, making them a very serious strategy for marketing on Facebook.

Facebook Sponsored Stories can be created easily through the Facebook ad create flow. Open Graph Sponsored Stories with a customized call to action require advertisers to use a third-party provider.

6. Facebook Open Graph

Facebook Open Graph lets businesses label a user’s action with their app. Billions of interactions are posted with Facebook Open Graph every day.

Businesses can create third-party apps that connect to a user and post a notice on Facebook when a user performs a specific action with the app. Facebook’s Open Graph allows for creative interactive options outside of the standard “like” and “comment.” Posts can suggest that users “listen,” “taste,” “read,” – it’s up to businesses to get creative.

Virtually any time a site or app prompts users to sign in to Facebook, it has something to do with connecting the user with the Facebook Open Graph.

Spotify is a great example of how Facebook Open Graph becomes a powerful Facebook marketing tool.

It all started with a Facebook login prompt. Followed by permission request, many users clicked it without any thought. I actually found that I had granted permissions to 130 applications, 95% of which I don’t remember why.With permission, Spotify can stream songs that users are listening to on friends’ news sources.

Note that users are offered multiple options-they can like the song that a friend is listening to, listen to the song themselves or use it as a favorite in Spotify.

Such open graph operations are unique enough to stand out from the chaos and madness of user news sources.

Many Facebook games frequently use Facebook’s open graph operations to post notifications when users complete levels or get achievements.

Taking advantage of word of mouth, the open chart action is classified as a new type of consumer story. Open graph posts make more sense to users because they are generated by a familiar friend (not just a brand), making them the latest and greatest in Facebook marketing tools.

7. Facebook Exchange (FBX)

Facebook Exchange lets advertisers take advantage of ad retargeting on Facebook through real-time bidding. Advertisers can target audiences based on web history data – when a user visits a product page on a retailer’s website, but fails to make a purchase, the retailer can then display an ad for that same product on Facebook with FBX.

Although Facebook redirect ads have only been placed in the sidebar, these ads have recently been allowed to appear in news feeds, which is Facebook’s most valuable real estate. This is great news for FBX advertisers, as newsfeed ads are 10 to 50 times more responsive than ad placements in the right column.

So how effective are Facebook Exchange ads? The click-through rate of Facebook Exchange ads is 40% lower than the click-through rates of other network redirect ads, such as those offered by the Google Display Network. Other redirect ads are also cheaper, with the price of a single click being 80% cheaper than Facebook targeted ads. However, FBX ads are much cheaper in terms of cost per impression and cost per click, so the monetary benefits depend on the needs of your business. These numbers will change as FBX ads start appearing more and more frequently in news feeds.

source from: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/04/15/facebook-marketing