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Edward Stern is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on online colleges and universities for the Guide to Online Schools.
Facebook is the most exceptional and exciting marketing tool in the history of the world, period. The social networking platform allows businesses to create a page, access 500 million and counting users, and target them based on location and interests. Never before has there been a way to reach so many people -- specifically, the ones you want -- so quickly and so affordably, as it's free to create a Facebook page.
However, like anything, there is certainly a right and wrong way to market through Facebook. If you do it wrong, you'll do serious damage to your marketing efforts, let alone the reputation of your company. Here's how NOT to market your business on Facebook; because sometimes, knowing what you shouldn't do helps you understand what you ought to be doing.
- Don't be THAT person who clogs feeds with daily updates on how amazing you are. The goal of social network marketing is to make them care, but there is no quicker way to further apathy and create disdain for your business than to spam the people who like your page. Don't spend every waking moment sending messages about how great your business is, especially when you have little in the way of backing it up.
- Do not offer deal after deal on Facebook, because you might get booted. Wanting to drive traffic and "likes" to your page is fine, but don't do it by offering miniscule Facebook-only deals. It'll frustrate your customers who don't live on the Internet and may even get you banned from Facebook; you have to get Facebook's approval to run a promotion on your wall. What you can do is publicize a promotion through Facebook -- but again, don't publicize it to death.
- Do not abandon your Facebook page to wither away and die. Social media can be confusing, and you may not always know the right thing to say, post, or promote. The best way to figure it out is to dive straight in and keep posting with persistence. Do not abandon your Facebook efforts after a week and a handful of "likes;" it's something you must build up, which takes patience and commitment, just like growing your business. Facebook is a free and unprecedented powerful marketing tool, so don't waste its potential.
- Your business' Facebook page is not your profile. It's good to give a human touch to your page and add pictures from the company picnic, but don't turn it into your profile or even something resembling a personal profile. Keep updates about your dog and that crazy bachelor party last weekend to yourself. When updating your business' Facebook page, keep it strictly business.
- Don't be shy about adding content to your page. Your clients want to see what your company is up to, so feel free to share anything that might be of interest to your client or potential client. Be sure to update regularly with wall posts, adding pictures, changing your info, etc. -- again, make a commitment and set aside time as part of your schedule dedicated to Facebook. A skimpy, unloved Facebook page is a waste of bandwidth and will live in Internet limbo forever, a sad testament to a failed effort nobody paid attention to.
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As always, I've been using and testing numerous tools that are essential, and not so essential but 'nice to haves', to develop business ideas for small business enterprising activities. Most recently, as an aspiring entrepreneur myself I've been utilising much talked about 'wordpress'. Wordpress is an open source content management system (CMS) often used to publish blogs, or business websites. Many of the worlds largest or most well known websites use the MYSQL and PHP back end that is Wordpress, 12% of the top 1,000,000 websites to be accurate.
Wordpress Formats - pros and cons?
Wordpress comes in two formats, wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The first, wordpress.com is free to use and you can customise your domain name (addyourwebsitename.com). It's easy to set up and hosting is free from Wordpress. There are certain disadvantages of this however for a beginner or non-technical curious, this option is fantastic for getting accustomed with blogging or basic web development. Spamming is taken care of as is set-up, upgrades and back-ups. I've recently used this to start a basic help and advice site for CV making - Visit how to Make a CV to track my progress so far (this website is less than a week old and is very much a work in progress). The disadvantages are that wordpress.com cannot be monetised as easily as other providers such as Google's Blogger or wordpress.org. Supposedly when your traffic gets to over 25,000 hits per month you can monetise the site and split the earnings 50/50 with Wordpress, however this isn't very good business in the long term. There is option to negotiate this I'm sure if you have massive traffic volume which would give you better negotiating standing. This factor isn't so important if you're just starting out as all of the content that is published on your website belongs to you and as such you can export the content to another website, along with your domain name at a later date, should your business website be lucrative in traffic volume.
Wordpress.org is a little more technie. It enables you to have full control of the PHP back end and integrate one of the many useful plug-ins that have been designed to improve and increase functionality which is very useful for a small business website. With wordpress.com, there are widgets available to improve functionality, as well as numerous fancy templates, but these are very limited in their use. Spamming and back-ups are not handled by Wordpress.org, you'll also need some more technical knowledge in how to set websites up, as well as having to pay for hosting (which isn't too expensive really anyway, I recommend Godaddy who are an excellent provider of domains and web hosting). I haven't fully tested wordpress.org as I wanted to get familiar with wordpress.com first, although I will be testing out wordpress.org in the near future to expand my learning and employ one of my business ideas. I'll report back my findings and in due course.
Summary
So far I've found Wordpress a very pleasant tool to use. I can see that it's got better applications for business because of how many widgets and plugins you can use. Also from my knowledge there are many more actively profitable users of wordpress than other free CMS providers. It's very popular within the geek community and there are endless tutorials available on how to set up, layout and make the most of your wordpress blog or wordpress CMS websites. The dashboard / admin section of the website is very easy to use indeed although the statistics that are available to your wordpress.com website are not as detailed or useful as google analytics, you can add Google Analytics to wordpress.org so at least there is this facility available within the products counterpart. I'll likely publish another article later on in my research to report more findings as at the moment this is just initial use and research. I can see that using wordpress.com is going to take a lot of the pain out of the publishing your content in a tidy, well presented manner, however the problem with monetising the blog / website concerns me - something that is satisfied by the fact that I know I can export my content at anytime to a more money friendly CMS, free or paid.
I'd recommend anyone learning to give this a go, although I'd also certainly recommend anyone looking to consider the 'best' option for their content purpose to consider other options also.
