Remember the bit about remembering squat about what you see or hear and much of what you say? Would you rather have customers see or hear your message –only– or have them also engaged in the process by adding their two cents, expressing their fears … and desires?
For the time being at least, Facebook is the 800 pound gorilla of online social media outside of China.
Over 400 million users and growing,
most distributed in the US and Europe,
the average user spending a hefty 55 minutes per day on the site,
half of all users logging in per day,
the average user having 130 friends and memberships in 12 groups. Facebook now arguably drives more traffic than Google.
Of course, the majority of social interaction time no doubt is spent between a few close family members and friends (and increasingly so on iPhones), but if you want access to where people are, Facebook is the place.
Of course, you have to play the game according to the rules. No commercial pitches are allowed to interfere with social interaction. If they did, Facebook’s popularity would suffer.
But there are ways. On Facebook fan pages, commercial content is allowed. And fans see fan page status updates. If fans interact positively with fan pages, they are more likely to be or become loyal customers.
The content must ideally be fresh, frequent, and interesting to fans. Contests, videos, quick polls, open-ended questions, comment sections, and games or puzzles may add spice to engage and increase the viewer’s attention. Ever been to a family-style sit-down restaurant with paper place mats? See a crossword puzzle on the back for kids?
You can also cross-pollinate on (or link to and from) other social media sites like Twitter or blogs, forums, or whatever is most appropriate to your business. And although one can put autoresponder widgets on fan pages, there would have to be good reasons to divert the viewer’s attention away from where-they’re-at on Facebook to busy email in-boxes.
Specials and sales can be for Facebook fans only, so there is usually no need to redirect to emails for those reasons. Become an affiliate of different products and services that may be of use to your niche or target market so that products and services complement each other and your product(s), if any, in particular.
Google Analytics and Paypal is now available on Facebook with obvious benefit to businesses with fan pages; Facebook is planning to have its own conversion tracking software and see Webtrends Facebook Analytics.
Tags: Facebook fan pages, marketing
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Interesting article i totally agree with the comments above. Keep writing