Facebook is a great place to market yourself and your business, because it has so many users who log in daily, but if you do it the wrong way you won't get much benefit from it, and might even annoy those potential customers. Let's look at three common mistakes that people make when using Facebook for marketing.
Broadcasting Their Message
One of the most common mistakes is broadcasting a message instead of creating opportunities for interaction with your followers. Marketers who are used to email as a marketing medium often make this mistake - they treat Facebook the same way they treat their email list.
Facebook is a "social" platform, however. It's very nature is one of two-way communication and sharing. You wouldn't walk up to someone at a party, give them a big sales pitch and then walk away with no chance for them to interact. But that's exactly how a lot of marketers treat their Facebook friends.
Spending Too Little Time
An effective Facebook strategy doesn't require you to be on the site 12 hours a day, but you do need to spend a bit of time interacting with people. If you just log in every now and then, post an update and move on, you're not going to engage many of your followers.
Plus, the way the Facebook news feed works, people need to be clicking on your links, reading your posts and otherwise interacting with the things you post or you won't show up in their "Popular" feed. If that happens, a large percentage of your friends will never even see anything you post, no matter how good it might be.
Violating Facebook's Terms of Service
When you sign up for a Facebook account, you agree to abide by their terms of service. But many marketers break those terms, even though they are probably unaware they're doing so.
Yes, terms of service agreements tend to be long and filled with legal mumbo-jumbo. But you're still responsible for ensuring you don't break them, or you could have your Pages or even your entire account shut down.
Two of the most common things that break the terms are tagging people in images without their permission (sometimes done to get their attention, for business purposes) and using the wrong category when you create your Page.
Make sure everything you're doing on Facebook is allowed under their terms or you could find yourself losing a lot of time and effort if it ever comes to their attention.
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Many marketers have tried affiliate marketing on Facebook and failed miserably, only to assume that it just doesn't work. That isn't the case - it can work exceptionally well - but you need to approach it the right way. In this article, we're going to look at several things to keep in mind when promoting affiliate offers on Facebook.
The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that people aren't expecting to be pitched some type of product on Facebook. They're there to be social - keep in touch with friends, play games, share pictures, etc. When you interrupt this with a marketing message, it will usually fall flat.
Instead, you need to integrate your marketing into their social stream so it fits into what they expect to see.
If you don't have a particular market or product type in mind already, one of the most effective things you can do is to set up a Facebook Page about a topic that people are going to be interested in, and want to be part of a community.
For example, you could create a Page about coffee and cover topics like the best types of beans, how to brew great coffee, what types of coffee machines are best, etc. There are a lot of people who are coffee aficionados and would "Like" a page like this.
Share updates about various things - new roasts you've tried, news about companies like Starbucks and Peets, etc. But you can also mix in some low-key promotions in the form of Amazon links or other product links. Which are your affiliate links, naturally.
Just make it more conversational in nature - not a blatant pitch for something.
You can also use Facebook to get new leads into your marketing funnel. You can create a Facebook Page that they can like, which adds them to your network. Then gradually push them to your own website off of Facebook, where they can sign up for your email newsletter.
Then you can put them into a more traditional marketing funnel, because you can contact them outside of Facebook itself.
Not everyone who is connected to you on Facebook is going to sign up for your email list, or even visit your website for that matter, but even if you only get a small percentage who do, that's more than you would have had otherwise.
Marketing on Facebook can be very effective, you just need to adjust your strategies to suit the mindset of people on the site, rather than using the stuff that may have worked on your own websites.
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