Facebook For Business Marketing eBook - HubSpot

How to Use for Business http://www.HubSpot.com Become a Fan of HubSpot on Facebook: http://Facebook.HubSpot.com Join the Pro Marketers Group on Facebook: http://Facebook.ProMarketers.com Grade Your Facebook Profile or Page: http://Facebook.Grader.com Want to learn more about using Facebook for business? Download the free kit to get more tips and tricks on using Facebook to market your business and drive more inbound traffic and leads. (http://bit.ly/FBKit) and post your questions in the InboundMarketing.com forums (http://www.InboundMarketing.com/Forum)! www.HubSpot.com Table of Contents - Part 1: Introduction to Facebook o Welcome o What Is Facebook? o Why You Should Care o Business Goals for Using Facebook - Part 2: Setting Up Your Facebook Profile o Personal Accounts vs. Business Accounts o A Tour of the Facebook User Homepage o Step 1: Sign up for an account. o Step 2: Edit your profile. o Step 3: Join networks. o Step 4: Connect with friends. o Step 5: Share information. o Step 6: Use applications. o Privacy Settings - Part 3: Using Facebook for Business o How to Set Up a Page o How to Promote a Business Page o Facebook Groups vs. Pages o How to Set Up a Group o How to Advertise on Facebook o Measuring and Analyzing o Conclusion and Additional Resources www.HubSpot.com Part 1: Introduction to Facebook Welcome At this point, you have heard of social media and inbound marketing. Maybe you experimented with Twitter and checked out your kids’ Facebook profiles, and you can see the value for college students who want to make sure they’re all at the same bar on Saturday night. But why does any of this matter to you or your business? Social media and inbound marketing are increasingly important assets for businesses to get found by and engage with potential buyers on the web. Think about the way you find information about products and services – are you watching TV ads? Going through your junk mail? Or are you going to a search engine or a friend? People have gotten better and better at ignoring marketing messages with DVRs, caller ID, and spam filters, and instead go to Google and social networks for answers to their questions. The question for you is: will you be there to answer it. Facebook is not an evil time-waster, a community just for college students, or something scary or irrelevant for marketers – even you B2B folks. Facebook is a tool for connecting people with those around them. And, as with any social media tool, marketers have an opportunity to use Facebook to expand their online footprint and engage with customers directly. But yes, it can be difficult to figure out what you can and should do. And yes, it can be quite a feat to convince your CEO to let you incorporate Facebook or a larger social media strategy into your marketing plan. But, armed with the right knowledge and metrics, it is possible. So here we go. In an effort to get marketers up to speed on how to use Facebook for marketing, we’re publishing this ebook that will walk you through (absolutely) everything you need to know about using Facebook for marketing to drive real business results. www.HubSpot.com What Is Facebook? Facebook is a social utility for connecting people with those around them – friends, family, coworkers, or simply others with similar interests. Facebook started in 2004 as a closed community for college students (requiring users to sign up with a valid university email address) but has since expanded beyond that to high schools, corporations, regional networks, or any user across the world. Facebook allows users to connect and share information in a variety of ways. Why You Should Care: Active Facebook At the time of this writing, Facebook has over 200 million active users1 and that number continues to grow steadily. It Users (Millions)is the third most trafficked website in the world (behind 200Google and Yahoo)2 and the most trafficked social media site in the world3. As early as July 2007, Facebook started calling itself one of the top people/social search engines on the 150web,4 though some disagree.5 Think your customers aren’t on Facebook? There are tens of 100thousands of regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks. More than two thirds of Facebook users are outside of college and the fastest growing demographic is 50those 35 years and older. While Facebook started off as a community for college students, it has expanded far beyond that and you will be hard-pressed to find a demographic not 0yet represented among Facebook’s 200 million users. 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Source: Facebook Business Goals for Using Facebook: Get found by people who are searching for your products or services Connect and engage with current and potential customers Create a community around your business Promote other content you create, including webinars, blog articles, or other resources This ebook will discuss how to use Facebook to achieve these business goals. 1 http://www.new.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics 2 Compete.com 3 Comscore 4 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2535632130 5 http://searchengineland.com/facebook-one-of-the-top-search-engines-i-dunno-about-that-11646.php www.HubSpot.com Part 2: Setting Up Your Facebook Profile This section is all about setting up your personal Facebook profile. To fully and authentically engage on Facebook, you should create a personal account and start making connections and sharing information. Personal Accounts vs. Business Accounts On Facebook, Profiles are meant for people and Pages are meant for businesses. To fully engage and leverage Facebook’s features, you should create a personal profile. If you’re worried about privacy, or balancing business and personal contacts, we’ll cover that in the next section. What not to do with your personal profile: Do not create a personal profile for your business. Profiles are for people, Pages are for businesses. Facebook is building significant new functionality for businesses, and all of this functionality is only available to Pages. We’ll talk about Pages more in a later section. What not to do: Do not create a personal profile for your business. Profiles are for people, Pages are for businesses. There are a few key differences between Business Pages and Personal Profiles: Pages allow you to designate multiple administrators, so that you can have multiple people help manage the account, and if one of your administrators leaves the company, you can still have control over the Page. Pages are, by default, public and will start ranking in Facebook and public search results. Pages are split into different categories (local businesses, brands, musicians) that help you get listed in more relevant search results. Personal profiles have friends, which require mutual acceptance, whereas anyone can become a fan of your Page without first going through administrator approval. Worried about privacy? Facebook is very flexible in letting you control your exposure on Facebook. A later section will discuss how to customize your privacy settings to control who sees which parts of your profile, so that you can safely engage on Facebook with both personal and business contacts. www.HubSpot.com A Tour of the Facebook User Homepage Filters – Filter the news feed Publisher – Post an update, Requests – View your stories by network, friend photo, link, video, etc. to be outstanding friend, event, or list, or story type (photos, published to your profile and application requests, as well status updates, etc.) to your friends’ news feeds. as unread page updates. News Feed – Your friends’ Highlights – Featured most recent activities photos, events, notes, etc. (posts, photos, etc.) that your friends are Notifications – Short throughout Facebook. interacting with. cut to view most recent notifications. Links to Applications – Facebook Chat – Set your Navigate to your applications. status and chat with your Facebook friends via instant message within Facebook. www.HubSpot.com Step 1: Sign up for an account. Go to www.facebook.com and sign up for a free account. Step 2: Edit your profile. Click on “Profile” in the top left-hand menu. Don’t worry about the homepage you see here quite yet – we’ll cover that later on, once you fill in your profile and add some friends. Click on the “Info” tab and then “Edit Information.” www.HubSpot.com Add basic, personal, contact, and work/education information. All information is optional, but use this as an opportunity to connect with people with similar interests and connections from school or work. Basic information: Birthday, hometown, relationship status. Personal information: Interests, activities, and a short “About Me” description. Contact information: Email address(es), phone number(s), location, website. Education and Work: High schools and universities you attended, as well as companies where you worked. Step 3: Join networks. Click on “Settings” in the top right-hand menu, and then “Account Settings.” On the Setting screen, choose “Networks.” Find some relevant networks to join. Networks play a key role in helping you connect with people. You can join a regional network (one only) and (up to five total) school or company networks (must have a valid email address for each). Joining a network will help people find you, and will help you rank higher in Facebook searches when the searcher is in a common network. Step 4: Connect with friends. Facebook’s goal is to help connect you with your friends, family, coworkers, and other connections. There are a few tools available to help you start connecting with people you already know. Click on “Friends” in the top-left menu and choose “Find Friends.” www.HubSpot.com You can import a contact list, have Facebook search your email address book, search for people in your networks, or even check out Facebook’s friend suggestions. Once you find someone you know, click “Add as a Friend.” Friends need to be mutually accepted, so “friending” someone will send them a message to confirm that you two are indeed friends. www.HubSpot.com Step 5: Share information. Facebook is great for sharing all sorts of information with your network, including photos, videos, notes, and links. From your homepage (what you see when you first log in to Facebook) or from your profile page, you will see a box where you can share your content. Any content you share will get posted to the Wall tab of your profile, and will also go out to the News Feeds of your friends. Step 6: Use applications. There are thousands of applications on Facebook that further help you share content and interact with others. To browse the applications you already could be using, or to browse more applications, click on “Applications” in the left hand corner of the bottom bar while logged into Facebook. Or, visit http://facebook.com/applications to browse available applications. Popular applications include Photos, Events, Movies, and Causes. www.HubSpot.com