Building Your Social Network

The Power of Facebook Marketing

Anyone who’s spent any time on Facebook knows that it’s a powerful advertising platform – at least, that’s what Facebook wants you to believe. And it’s true, Facebook does feature some very robust pay-per-click advertising capabilities, with market segmentation features far beyond anything that Google Adwords can deliver. But, for the small business owner looking to capitalize on PPC advertising, the real power of Facebook is its potential for customer interaction and brand recognition.

“For the small business owner looking to capitalize on PPC advertising, the real power of Facebook is its potential for customer interaction and brand recognition.”

This is especially true for businesses and brands that might otherwise lack social-media appeal. Barring the most creative social media campaigns, no users want to follow a company that mindlessly posts advertisement after advertisement to their Facebook feed. Even though these companies may garner a large following through big-name brand recognition or aggressive advertising campaigns, the actual return on investment for Social Media depends more on interaction with the fan base and overall content strategy than on numbers alone. In other words, 10,000 followers won’t do you any good if 9,995 of them ignore or hide your posts.

Foster a Community (and market to them)

Building a large Facebook community can help improve overall SEO.

So what’s the solution? If numbers alone don’t matter, how can a small business hope to compete with big-name brands? The answer is simple on paper, and surprisingly simple in practice, too. Small businesses are part of the community – whether it’s local, state-wide, or a community of professionals dispersed around the globe. By using your brand as a focal point for this community, you can create meaningful content that involves your followers, and is beneficial both to your brand and your marketing efforts. If the majority of your content is useful, your fan base is much more likely to pay attention, so when your occasional post advertising a seasonal special or your newest product does come down the line, it’s being delivered to a captive audience.

Unparalleled Success

Let’s look at a business that experienced astounding results in a short period of time. One of our clients was looking to create a social media strategy to enhance their overall SEO impact. In a few weeks, we helped build a series of campaigns around our client’s existing community involvement, and established the following goals:

• Create a meaningful online community built around local involvement.
• Provide content that is not only interesting, but that followers will want to share with their friends, growing our client’s fan base.
• Bring in and share content created by followers, fostering a feeling of shared effort.
• Use this community as an opportunity to expand our client’s online marketing base beyond existing customers.
• Utilize this expanded base to promote brand recognition, and increase ROI on SEO efforts outside of Facebook.

A Strategy of Giving

In with one of our clients, we created a series of simple Facebook applications centered on rewarding followers for participation in their Facebook community, the most successful of which took advantage of the pre-existing charitable donations our client made every year. Implementing a new facebook app, our client encouraged followers to nominate local charities for donations. In exchange for this submission, our client asked only for an email address and a “Like” for their Facebook page. The results speak for themselves, in just over 4 weeks, their  following grew from 140 to 800 – that’s an increase of 2,203%.

What’s even more important is that these new followers don’t see our client’s Facebook page as a source of advertisements, rather it’s a place that the people come together to promote and thank local charities for the hard work they do. In other words, news from our client is not only more likely to be seen, but more likely to be read because of its positive place in the community – a huge boon to our client’s social media marketing efforts.

What about SEO?

An excellent question. For now it’s difficult to establish exactly what impact a popular Facebook page will have on your site’s ranking, but we do know that there is a correlation. Both Google and Bing have explicitly stated that there is a connection between links shared through Twitter and Facebook and site rankings. For a small business, getting links out through your fanbase can be an important aspect of your SEO strategy. But, if no one wants to share your content, and no one wants to follow your page, what’s the point? The SEO takeaway is this: a social media strategy that isn’t content-focused does nothing for your site’s search ranking.

Because of the increasingly social nature of the web, SEO and social media marketing campaigns should work together, where growth in one fosters growth in the other. Apply a content-based approach to your social media campaigns, and you’ll see positive results in all aspects of your online-marketing strategy.

Looking to improve your business’s social media marketing or SEO? We’d love to help. Contact us today and find out how we can help you grow your online business.