Facebook is increasingly becoming a gold mine for marketers to promote their company’s product or service. Not only are college students and graduates are utilizing this service, but also professionals from around the world are logging into this medium on a consistent basis. The trick is how to exploit this forum and use it to your advantage.
Facebook consist of many viral marketing and social networking channels. Even by simply, legitimately placing a link on your profile back to your site could result in the difference of whether or not you reach your projected sales conversions for the month. When you think about it, look at the global reach you create by merely spending five minutes to create a profile.
In order to aid developers, Facebook recently enabled developers to create XML sitemaps. By allowing this implementation, search engine bots will be notified of updates to your page through Facebook, which consistently holds a high page PageRank.
In addition, the contents of a profile are now searchable in all of the major search engines, which creates the potential for your ranking and visibility to drastically increase. Also, every time a person edits or adds to their existing profile, a mini-feed will be sent to all of the user’s friends, which generates the opportunity for instant, free marketability.
One of the newest features that marketers can utilize from Facebook is its Fan page. The greatest aspect of this feature is that every time someone from around the world becomes a fan of your company, a notification will be posted on that person’s news feed (which is visible to all of his/her friends). According to the Search Engine Journal, there are six reasons why you should take advantage of this application. They are as follows:
1. Pages are public. Most of Facebook is behind a login, preventing search engines from indexing. However, some Fan pages are not behind a login and thus search engines can index the page. Hopefully, people will stumble on the result in SERPs, visit the Facebook page, and then get to your site via the link (see reason #2).
2. Pages include links. Because the pages are public, you can get some nice facebook.com link credit. You can’t use an anchor text, but hey, it’s free.
3. Send “updates to fans”. One of the greatest features is that you can send “updates” to fans whenever you want. It’s a nice way of building a database of interested users. Send messages about new products, updated website, etc.
4. You control the page. Making the page before a Fan or a competitor is critical. You want to be able to send the messages, edit or remove sections, and control the information to an extent.
5. News feed. When a someone joins a Fan page, it’s published in their News feed for all their to read (unless they have turned this off). It makes someone joining your Fan page somewhat viral.
6. It’s free and easy. Making a Fan page takes just a few minutes – add some information, URL, and upload the logo and you’re done. You can make your page here.
Facebook is free, effortless and can have the potential to spread the word about your company to the masses with relative quickness. A little free promotion on today’s most valued medium could not hurt, right? Use, but do not abuse this service and you could see traffic to your website increase exponentially!