Optimizing Facebook Marketing for Your Business

Part of the Facebook Marketing For Dummies Cheat Sheet

Facebook offers many ways to promote your business to its online community. From creating a Facebook Page for your business, to starting a topical group, to launching a targeted ad campaign, Facebook is becoming an increasingly important component of a company’s online marketing plan. Following are some Facebook marketing tactics that can work for your business:

Share your content. A Facebook presence should be on everyone’s list of must-haves for social network marketing. But once you have a presence for marketing your business, you need a content strategy. What will you share with your fans? Why should they come back?

Be sure to get your employees involved. Encourage them to become fans and drive the conversations to create a thriving community. Also, keep in mind that Facebook Pages are indexable by major search engines, so be sure to write your content with the best search engine optimization practices in mind.
Advertise. Advertising on Facebook is unlike any advertising medium you’ve experienced before. Thanks to its advanced targeting capabilities and mass audience, you can reach as narrow or broad of an audience as you desire. Link to pages either inside Facebook or on a Web site of your own and include social actions, such as becoming a fan of a Page or RSVPing to a Facebook event.
Create an application. Another way to market yourself on Facebook is through branded apps. Facebook apps are software modules that you can install on your personal Facebook profile or Page to add unique functionality, further engage your audience with your brand, and help market your business.

These apps can take many different forms, from video players to business cards to contest solutions. Facebook offers countless apps for marketers, but creating a Facebook app of your own has become widely popular among marketers.
Syndicate your content. If you already have a blog, podcast, or video series, you can leverage that content across your Facebook Page. Use the Notes feature to import blog posts to your Page and Involver’s Twitter for Pages app to integrate your Twitter feed into your Page. In addition, the Simply RSS application brings in all the RSS feeds, and there are plenty of third-party applications to help with this.
Throw an event. Facebook Events are a great way of getting people together virtually or in person in support of your local business, brand, or product. It's also a very economical way of getting the word out beyond your normal in-house marketing list by inviting the fans of your Page who can then help promote your event to their friends.

Don’t forget to follow up after your event. You can even post photos from the event and send them to all who attended. If you had a very healthy debate at your event, with lots of questions, why not send a transcript out to everyone who attended? And if some questions didn’t get answered because of time constraints, consider writing up the answers and sending them to all attendees.
Claim your business on Facebook Places. Places is Facebook’s geolocation tool that allows members to check in to a venue they're visiting, see what’s going on nearby, tag friends who are with them, share photos, and share thoughts about what’s going on where they are.

As you can imagine, creating and claiming a Facebook Places page for your business can be an excellent marketing tool. When people check in to a venue nearby, your business comes up as a Nearby Place. If a visitor checks in to your Places venue, it shows up in his News Feed so that his friends can see he’s frequenting your business.