The latest buzzword in online marketing is SMM, or social media marketing. Facebook's pervasive popularity makes it the ideal platform for promoting your business. Here are some ideas on how to make the most of its great marketing potentials.
You need to have a separate twitter business account personal and business account on Facebook. For your business account, you have two options. You can create an account that is devoted exclusively to your business. The second option is to open another account under a person who will act as your company's spokesperson. You can hire another person for this position, or you can create your own alter ego. As your company spokesperson, the profile should be concise and professional. You also need to create a separate e-mail account for his alter ego where you can route all the e-mails of your business contacts and clients. Once you have these people's addresses on the new e-mail account, you can let Facebook request these people to be added to your list of friends under the new account.
To create your business page, look for the button for creating a page. This is under facebook.com/pages. The page name is not editable once it has been set-up. To maximize your ranking, add keywords that you want to be associated with.
The profile picture of your page gives you a lot of creative license. You can adapt and modify it to your personal preferences. Profile pictures can have maximum dimensions of 200 px by 600 px. You can do a lot with that amount of space. Keep in mind, though, that for the thumbnail image, Facebook will only show a 170px square. It will crop out 15px on the left and right for margins. To choose which part of your profile picture would show on the thumbnail, use the edit icon function. The edit thumbnail command will allow you to drag the picture to the area you want to capture.
After managing your business profile picture, focus on the content of your page. You can display information about your company on the info tab. You need to make the content concise, informative and interesting to your prospective visitors. Don't forget to use keywords related to your business to maximize the indexing of your page on search engines.
You can create additional tabs on your page, which can be linked to your blog. This will allow you to post any updates from your RSS or Twitter on to your wall or on a separate tab. There are applications for posting photos or video, as well as contests and freebies. Position these elements to make the most important portions show up prominently.
The moment you get 25 fans on your page, go to facebook.com/username so you can change your URL into something more easily identifiable with your business.
Take advantage of the FBML (Facebook Mark-up Language) to build an appealing landing page. If you don't want to start from scratch, avail of templates offered by template stores.