Facebook Lesson: How To Use Facebook Pages

The Facebook Page

The basic Facebook Page is free and simple, and can be a great way to complement your Internet marketing – and it is even a reasonable substitute if you really don’t want to build your own website because you lack the technical confidence or don’t have the time.

Pages don’t give you the flexibility of your own website, but that can be an advantage for the sort of owner who would otherwise tend to go crazy dealing with implementing webpage features and design.

Pages don’t matter if you don’t give users a reason to ‘Like’ you, and to do that you need to provide information that’s interesting and relevant, information they can’t get somewhere else, information that’s free and a place where FB users can, if they want, share information with you.  And to increase the numbers getting to your Page, use your website with a Facebook ‘Like’ button, suggest your Page to your Facebook friends, invite relevant Facebook groups and other Page admins to connect to you, and consider Facebook ads.

Facebook Pages are for business, whereas Profiles are for friends. You could optionally use Groups, but Pages are better, as it’s easier to ‘Like’ a Page than ‘join’ a Group, Pages are also indexed by the search engines, there are analytics available, you can add Applications and you can target any ads you set up to your Page. Facebook pages can also be customized using FBML – Facebook’s own mark-up language that will change to HTML in 2011 – that allows you to code images, flash, video and other content into your Page. It’s powerful, and can really help complete objectives – for example you can add email capture into your Page.

Facebook isn’t just here to make it easier to let your friends know what you are currently eating for lunch, and to find old high school mates. Facebook is actually starting to build another business model – an advertising platform for its users. Its called ‘Facebook Ads‘ – it’s still relatively new, but it’s already pretty good, and in many ways a better alternative to using Google Adwords(and most other paid search tools).

Start off by searching for previous enquirers and guests who are on Facebook, and connect with them.

This form of relationship building (in fact, any relationship building using any social media channel) is best used to drive social recommendation, and build lasting customers relationships, not immediate bookings, and it’s the heart of social media marketing.

Fans vs. Engagement

First though, some more about Facebook Fans. Fans are great, and you’ll love seeing the number of them growing, but you know what? As a group, they’re pretty worthless. Research shows that almost half of them (40 per cent) don’t want to see your marketing messages – or any messages at all for that matter. And a third of them (38 per cent) will just stop following your updates. And at least half will never come back to your fan page – ever. (ExactTarget research reports)

Proudly counting your Fans as a benchmark of any social media success is a bit like counting Hits as a benchmark of a website’s popularity. It’s meaningless. Whatever the number, it doesn’t really explain effectiveness. Instead, use Facebook Insights to measure engagement. Use Monthly Active Users and Lifetime Likes.

Example A: Fans could total 5,000. Monthly Active Users could total 1,800, and Lifetime Likes total 7.000.

Example B: Fans total 20,000. Monthly Active Users total 3,400 , Lifetime Likes 73,000.

Example A has an engagement rate of 25% and Example B an Engagement Rate of 4%. Using this metric, Example A with less Fans has a more successful engagement rate (and social media strategy) than Example B.