Facebook For Brands

Sometimes I wondered how Facebook is taking over the entire internet very quickly. At the moment, Facebook is providing a perfect social networking service. Anything that one can think of is available in it. Connecting with friends, family and finding new people, sharing pictures and videos and communicating with each other through personal messages. Everything is there in Facebook for a person to interact with others.

Other than personal social networking experience, Facebook is playing a very interesting roll in development and recognition of brands. Facebook fan pages are a great source of indentifying brand activities and popularity. You can not only make your online presence with Facebook page but also get connected to your clients and target audience.

Going all out, interacting and developing relations with your target audience by associating a feeling with your brand had never been so effective before. Facebook page allows you not only to share your company information but also provides all the necessary tools to effectively launch and establish your brand.

Other then brand establishment, Facebook also helps you generate leads and bring in traffic for your website. The problem is that most of the business owners, that want to develop their brand, are not just persistence enough over Facebook. Posting some interesting information once in a couple of weeks is not enough. It is a great tool to establish and get your brand recognized but doing it with persistence and loyalty is very important. It can not only help you promote your brand but can also destroy your brand image completely.

When marketing your entity over Facebook, you need to be sure of what you are doing is right. First thing is to create a fan page for your brand. I’ll explain the basic elements of a fan page before going any further.

The default tabs or you can call it built in pages, within a Facebook page includes the following:

Information

This is the first and the most basic tab. You can provide all the information about your company in here. When were your company founded, your products and services, location and where a user can contact you.

Discussions

Discussions tab is just like a discussion forum. You and your page fans can create different interesting topics to discuss with your other page fans.

Photos

You can share your product images, event pictures or any other graphics that can be of user interest. There is no limit on number of pictures and you do not have to worry about an interactive photo gallery.

Videos

Visuals play an important role in development of brands. The video ads are a very effective source of above the line advertising. Uploading, storing and sharing your product and service videos with your fans definitely encourage them to interact directly with you.

Events

Are you going to have a general business meeting that you want your fans to know about? You have an informative seminar about your products and services in place? Group activity event or any event that you want to share can be created and your fans can let you know if they are attending the event or not. With Facebook events, you can organize gatherings and parties with your friends, as well as let people in your community know about upcoming events.

Notes

Notes are just like blogs with additional feature that you can tag your friends in it so that they get notified that you have created a note. You can share your own experiences in writing or your company or brand activities.

Links

You have something really interesting over your website or anywhere over the internet; you can share it with your fan page members.

Wall

Facebook page wall is the most effective and important tool. All activities that you perform over your page, uploading and sharing photos, videos and even a single line of ‘Hello all fans!’ is visible to everyone. Whatever you share over your page wall goes directly to the news feed of all the Facebook users who have ‘Liked’ your page. This toll helps you to interact and answer all the queries and comments of your fans.

These are the basic elements of a Facebook fan page and the most interesting thing about these basic elements is that whenever you’ll use any of these, your fan page members will be able see it in their news feeds and can comment over it right from their own profile. In other words, if I would want to comment over a picture or a video, shared by your fan page, I won’t have to visit the fan page and this is what makes it real easy for your fans to interact with you.

Now you are ready to go for inviting your friends and other people that are connected to you to the fan page you have created for the brand. It’s just not enough to create a page and then invite people to it. You have to understand a few other things that will help you in promotion of your brand.

Spamming

Most of us spam a lot and do it without even knowing that we are spamming. A business start-up would tend to bring in as much traffic and visitors as he can without caring about the destruction that his brand will face. Too many posts and activity performed over a fan page will defiantly annoy the people who have ‘Liked’ it. Remember, posts are not just limited to Wall of a fan page. Uploading a video, sharing pictures, creating events and anything that you do over Facebook page will be shared with the people who are following your brand. So, if you make one post over your wall by saying, “Hello fans!”, then share a picture, then upload a video and then post a link, these will become four posts by your page and trust me, it is very annoying for a user to see a page spamming his recent news feed.

So, be very careful with activities that you perform over your brand page. It would be a good practice just to share one thing, it could be a picture, a link, video or just a “Hello” to fans, in a day.

Persistence

It’s our nature that we want quick results and if we don’t see anything coming our way, we just abandon it and that is where we need to change our attitude. You have to be persistence with your Facebook page promotion. Make changes and posts regularly and keep inviting people whenever you post something interesting and informative.

Personal interaction

Whenever you post something over your wall, it is visible to everyone. People comment over it and even ask questions. Be sure to post only that is relevant and informative about your brand so that the comments and questions can be asked only about your brand. Answer all the questions asked by people properly and encourage users to comment and question. This will help you in your brand awareness.

Action in Right Direction

Most business owners get disappointed with Facebook when they don’t see good results within a few days of their Facebook launch. I have met a number of people who complain that their page is not showing results as they had expected. When I ask them how old is their fan page, they usually reply, “two months” or “five months”. This is good enough a time to get a nice number of followers. Then what could be wrong? When I ask them how much time have they spent daily in promotion of their page, they usually reply “three or four hours”. Again, it is good enough time to give to your Facebook page then what are they doing wrong here?

They are not spamming, they are persistence and give 3 to 4 hours daily in promoting the page, they are interacting with users and they are doing it for more than 3-4 months. A clear thought should be that they are not doing what they should.

Facebook is basically a social networking application and most of the users over Facebook are there to interact with other people, share thoughts and collaborate. When I ask these people that what they do over Facebook in these 3-4 hours that they think they are giving to their page in promoting it. Always, the answer is, “we comment over our friends status, play some games, visit other pages that are successful in branding to see what they are doing, comment and answer users over other pages”.

Now, can anyone tell me where the answer of my question is, which actually was, “What do you do over Facebook, 3-4 hours day, for promotion of your page?” Clearly, you are only wasting your time and energies. You are not doing anything to promote your own page and that is the only thing where most of the people act in wrong direction without knowing it.

Facebook has already reached over 500 million users from all over the world. This means that if you do it right, you are a global brand before even you would know it. Action in right direction is very important for your success with branding over Facebook. Be persistent with Facebook marketing. Avoid the mistakes that most people make and make your way to the success of your brand.