Anyone in business knows that social media forms a key component in any modern marketing strategy. But how does that work? Let’s look at Facebook. I’m going to assume you’ve already got a Facebook account and you have a few ‘Friends’ – probably 90% of whom you’ve never met;)
First thing you need to do is form a group. Look to the left of your page and you’ll find a list of options that begins with ‘News Feed’. If it’s not showing up under that, click on ‘More’ and it’ll appear underneath. So click on groups . Then click on ‘Create a group’. There are lots of groups out there, so what are you going to call it? You want to think about this. If you’re a business, you want that name to tie up with your business name or primary benefit.
Let me give you a real life example. I’m a marketing consultant for a company selling acu mats manufactured by Mysa. Now these Mysa mats – already very successful in Sweden – are fitted with dozens of ‘healing tips’. As you lie on the mat, these specially coated healing tips work on your back and neck like a gentle kind of acupressure, stimulating blood circulation and the release of healing hormones, such as endorphins and oxytocin.
OK, so what did you take from that? Healing tips anyone? See the word play?
Then I went over to Google’s keyword tool and did a search for ‘healing tips’. Over 8,000 a month. Not bad. We’re not, at this stage advertising this group, but maybe at some later stage, so it’s good to know these words pull traffic.
So I called the group ‘Healing Tips with Mysa’. It sounds – to passing traffic – like a forum offering tips on healing, right? When they get there, people discover it’s a word play. But it’s not a meaningless word play – the Mysa mat does heal the body.
So there’s a very good chance people’s interest will in fact grow as they read about the group. Especially if they have a bad back;) The group’s name also ties up with the strap line for the product – ‘Healing tips with a mat from Sweden’. See what we’re doing here? It’s called branding. So then you want to create a ‘Page’, or fan page. That’s usually pretty straight forward – you call it the same thing, only this time it’s ‘fans of…’ What if you don’t have a product? OK, give yourself an identity. What’s your usp – or, in English, your unique selling point? How are you going to promote – i.e. brand – yourself in business?
I called my own internet marketing group ‘Generous Entrepreneurs Online’ because it matches my website name. I like the word ‘generous’ as it supposes people in my group will be generous about offering up tips on internet marketing.
Now your description. Here you want to write a short description about what your group is for. Make sure it sounds like it has some benefits to offer by joining. This isn’t a sales page. This is all about you and your members sharing tips and maybe even stories related to your theme. Once you’ve formed your group, you’ll need to add members. If your group is very niche, you won’t want to invite all your friends. I wouldn’t invite all my friends to my internet marketing group purely to get numbers – you want participating members after all, the same as you want targeted traffic.
To find new members, you have to go into groups related to your own group and ‘add a friend’, one by one. Something like, Hi, there, I see we’re in the same internet marketing group. I’m also working in internet marketing. My primary business is X and I was wondering what you market for yours…’ Something like that. You shouldn’t be at all salesy, adding a link to some product or site – this is just spam. All you’re doing here is asking people to ‘confirm’ you as a friend and gently point them in the direction of your group and give a reason why it may be of interest NOT as a business opportunity but, rather, as a space in which to share same-theme-related experiences with other members.
Later, once you’ve added, say, 10-15 friends – and do your friends adding organically or you may attract the wrong kind of attention from fb ‘police’ – you can send all of them an email inviting them to your group. In that email you can talk to your invitees about the benefits of your particular service or product – but again, this is purely informative, not salesy. Once you have a group of 20 plus, you can send occasional emails – say one or two a week – informing members of a couple of benefits pertaining to your product or service. Don’t blast them a full-blown advertorial, just a couple of benefits each time. And ask them what they think of e.g. the Mysa mat? Get people to participate and chat. With time, these people will grow more curious and start to visit your site. And some, of course, will purchase from you.
You can then email your group to, say, a video demo of someone using and talking about his or her success with a Mysa mat. It could be a youtube video or, better still, a video ont he main website’s Blog page.
In fact, as Chris Farrell has been showing in an excellent series of videos on affiliate marketing 2.0, you can do this for any niche/group you go for. If your group is yoga, send members to videos in which you review a yoga related product. Put your link down and they can go from your video to the sales page. And you can bet they’ll be much more likely to buy if you do it this way because they’ll arrive at the sales page feeling they’ve first had an honest review from someone they trust.
So that’s groups. If you want to move a little quicker, you need to master facebook ads. The best guide I’ve come across is Jonathan Volk’s Facebook Ads Guide. I’ll be reviewing it shortly, but if you’re impatient, go check out this A-Z on Facebook ads for yourself.
