Nextwave Media - Creative Internet Solutions

With Facebook predicted to reach one billion!! users by August 2012 that is a lot of potential customers! As many users openly display their interests, you would have thought that Facebook would be heaven for marketers.

In reality, very few companies are successfully exploiting the channel to promote their business, and many of those have big budgets. So why and how should an SME or start-up think about Facebook as a marketing channel?

Forming a Facebook fan page is often viewed as a fantastic way to engage with the public, and if you do it right it can be hugely successful.

Coffee chain Starbucks has more than 26 million members on its Facebook fan page, and is by far and away the most successful brand on Facebook. But for small businesses the challenge is that much harder as they don’t enjoy the same level of brand awareness. For example, more than three quarters (77 per cent) of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 members.

Using Facebook as a Fan Page

This is by far one of the most powerful changes, in my opinion, to fan page functionality. Why? Before this change, there were only a few ways to share your fan page with people who are not a fan of your brand on Facebook. The first was by sharing the page directly with your personal profile’s contacts. The second was by hoping that your page’s fans would share it with their contacts. And the third was by spending money with Facebook advertising.

Now, with the option to use Facebook as your page, you can do something that reaches out to Facebook users in your targeted audience for free. Here are easy steps on how to get your brand in front of a larger Facebook audience.

How to Use Facebook as Your Page

Interesting read for those clients of ours with Facebook pages (which is nearly everyone!). This PDF file was released by Facebook themsleves and contains a wide range of tip and tricks and ideas to get the most out of your Facebook business page.

Follow the link to the PDF below via the Facebook site…

Building your business with Facebook page

Came across this informative article over on All Facebook about marketing your business page on Facebook.
Do it well, the benefits are:

• Engagement: Greater interaction
• Visibility: Facebook shows your posts to more of your fans
• Free fans: You get more fans for free — one Fortune 1000 company combining good advertising and engagement tactics got more than half of their fans for free.
• Testimonials: Your fans become so positive that they give spontaneous testimonials which convince fans who are still just prospects how great you are
• Reputation protetction: Overwhelming positivity on a fan page wards off negative attacks from critics and provides volunteer defenders

Read the rest of the post

If your business isnt already on Facebook, you are potentially missing out on a valuable free marketing channel. Talk to us today

Just read an interesting article over on sixrevisions.com titled the Ultimate Guide to the New Facebook Page Design. If you are looking to take advantage of the overhaul to Facebook Pages, its a recommended read.

View the full post

Super interesting read over on iMedia Connection about the Facebook news feed algorithm (ranking of facebook news feed items).

“While the math and the rules behind the algorithm are a bit fuzzy, the premise is simple. Facebook doesn’t want any user bombarded with useless, irrelevant content. EdgeRank doesn’t just apply to user profiles. It’s also used for pages. The algorithm determines which users will see the content from the pages they “like.”

This may be news to many businesses marketing on Facebook, many must be thinking each and every status or page update they make is automatically displayed on their “fans” walls. Not the case. If you stop and think, some weighting or ranking has to apply otherwise a users wall would quickly fill up with not so relevant updates and be replaced with more updates before they could see the more relevant ones.

By now, it’s understood that social media networking and marketing are invaluable to business. It seems this may be particularly true for small businesses, who are now turning more of their resources toward online and social media marketing.According to a recent study conducted by eMarketer, more than half of all small businesses (55%) consider Facebook beneficial to their business. Other social media sites that were ranked as moderately or highly beneficial include Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. If you are a small businesses owner who has not yet ventured far into the world of social media, you may wonder, “Why do they consider these sites important?”

First and foremost? Businesses look to social media marketing to generate leads. Almost 60% of the small businesses surveyed said that “Lead Generation” was positively affected by social media marketing. Another top-rated and highly important benefit is keeping up with the industry. Any small business owner will tell you that it’s hard to compete when you’re not sure what the competition is up to.

Hows this for a low cost, easy advertising campaign that will generate buzz, create new customers, and develop new content for your products: the social photo contest. Create a photo contest campaign that includes your customers using/wearing/holding your product(s). It is inexpensive, easy to set up, and surprisingly effective. Talk to us today about how to go about this.

Converting visitors into customers is about more than just supplying great product information. It’s about more than a great design, simple navigation and customer service links. The basics–such as page design and content presentation are certainly necessary. But if you want to grow a loyal customer base for the long term, you have to reach even further.
Here are six ways to engage visitors and turn more of them into actual customers, bringing friends with them.

1. Serve up the ideal newsletter. Contrary to what some social media “experts” say, people still like to receive email from companies they love and from stores that carry items or product lines to which they’re devoted. By integrating useful tips and links to articles or invites to forums, you’re opening up a channel for conversation, of which customers will take advantage.

This special issue of Web Digest features “boutique” blogs on Social Media with original content.

Out of the hundreds of blogs out there on Social Media, we’ve selected 9 that we think are worthy of your valuable time.

1. Social Media Optimization

David Wilson, who writes this daily blog, runs a search engine marketing agency so it’s no surprise that he views Social Media marketing through an SEM lens. His blog posts offer practical advice on incorporating Social Media wisely into a marketing program.

He’s not afraid to swim against the tide of conventional wisdom either. One recent post, “Don’t Build Your Brand on a Third Party Platform,” argued why businesses should not dump their websites for Facebook Pages.

Looking for case studies? Wilson devotes an entire page to them, many detailing his own company’s experiences. (Example: His company compared Facebook Ads with Google Adwords and found the Facebook program delivered a significantly higher ROI.)

Instead of putting an entire offer or promotion in your email, use teaser content that points to more information on your website or blog. This has the added bonus of providing customers and prospects with more of a reason to click a link and make their way over to your site. It also creates the possibility of up-selling other products and services on your website.

Recently stumbled on this hugely informative blog post for businesses currently using or wanting to use Facebook and indeed social media as a whole. It lists ways to better engage Facebook fans. Breaking down recommendations into two areas: sharing quality content and inciting comments.

For each area, the author provides tactical methods to use to increase engagment (unless, of course, you already have too many visitors to your Facebook page) such as:

• How often you should post
• What you should post
• How to find quality content

A very worthy read for hose businesses starting out with Facebook. The opportunities here are huge…

Talk to us today about utilising Facebook in your marketing mix.