Basic Business Strategies

According to Alexa, Facebook is the second most popular website next to Google. I researched more and found that around 30% of the global internet subscribers visit Facebook every day. Facebook currently has 300 million subscribers and is growing rapidly. 45 Million updates are made on Facebook every day and world wide users spend around 8 billion minutes per day.

What does it mean to you as an internet marketer? It is a large gold mine. Isn’t it? However, How are you going to position yourself uniquely and promote your business on Facebook considering the large volume of updates being posted on Facebook every day? How do you grasp the attention of the Facebook users? The purpose of this post is to make you aware of the basic Facebook marketing strategies and tools that you need to successfully generate leads and dominate.

Always remember Facebook is a social network and should not be used to pitch your business. Prosperity in your Facebook marketing is directly proportial to the number of solid relationships developed with fellow users.So, Lets gets started

Facebook Profile

– A picture is worth thousand words. Make sure to add a picture in your profile
– Fill in your past info such as schools went and make it public so that people can find you through search
– Fill in your interests and make it public so that fellow subscribers could relate to you
– Fill in all your websites such as a blog, Twitter, your capture pages etc on your profile. By default, only your primary website is displayed. I would highly recommend to display all your websites in your profile. Anyone visiting your profile page could click on your URLS and learn more about you

Add Friends

After creating a profile, do not wait for things to happen. Go ahead and find and add few friends a day every day. It is advised that you can add up to 25-30 friends everyday. Excessive adding of friends will result in removing your page by Facebook administrators.

Interact with friends through like and comment

Once you have added a few friends and see their content on your home page, start interacting with them by liking and commenting on their updates. Commenting on updates could have a viral effect. When you comment on an update, your comment will show up on the updater’s wall and is visible to all his friends. So, it pays to make intelligent comments and get traffic back to your page. Also, feel free to share quotes, posts, and videos that had a positive impact on you. Key is to interact with Facebook friends as much as possible.

Facebook Photo Albums

Feel free to share your pictures and videos with your friends on Facebook. People would love to know more about you through pictures and videos. If you have been to a networking event and have taken pictures with the leaders and fellow networkers, share those pictures with stories about the events and see the traffic to your website increasing

Facebook Videos

If a picture is worth thousand words, how much is a video worth? In 2009, video marketing has been growing rapidly and is here to stay. Facebook allows you to either upload videos or shoot a video instantly. More you share the videos, better it is. Do share your videos about networking events, funny incidents, achievements and any other video that could have a positive influence on others. I use the video feature of Facebook in a couple of ways and am seeing phenomenal results:

1. I introduce myself to recently added friends. A short video describing who I am and appreciating for friendship
2. I use instant Facebook video recording option to wish birthdays to friends

Facebook Groups

Group positions you as a leader and displays the value you can provide to fellow networkers. Facebook users who join your group can be converted to prospects for your biz by using effective attraction marketing strategies. It pays to establish a group and providing value to the members of the group through emails, invitations to an event etc. I also use groups in Facebook to identify like minded people and to promote my posts.

Facebook Events

Facebook allows you to create a public event ( viewable to all members of Facebook) and provides you URL that can be used to communicate on other social networks like Twitter, MySpace etc. I send an event invitation via email to all my group members. Event feature keeps track of the users status (attending, not attending, may be) about the event. I see an increase in numbers for the event when I blast a reminder email to people who were not sure or were planning to attend.

Facebook Wall posts

Evey user in Facebook has a wall where he posts messages and moderates the comments made. If you are a core Facebook user, I am sure that you must be posting and promoting your content on your wall. However, It is worth much more to learn how to post your content effectively on walls of the members having a huge number of friends. It can be done by giving a lot of value that could be beneficial to the users visiting the page. Facebook will disable your account if they see you spamming. So, be cautious while using this approach.

Facebook Notes

Do you have a self hosted word press blog? If no, I would highly recommend you to start blogging and provide valuable content. Facebook notes is an awesome feature you can use to make your valuable blog content visible publicly to all members of Facebook. Also, there are applications that imports your blog content into the notes in an automated way. Isn’t that cool?

This feature would increase your blog traffic tremendously and ultimately your sales if you are using the blog as central hub/nerve center as I mentioned in my Attraction Marketing Blueprint post.

Facebook Applications

I am not a big fan of applications on Facebook as I generate enough traffic using the resources mentioned above. However, there are couple of applications that I personally use

Vuyou (Video Email Application): If you are an internet marketer and are generating leads through various marketing strategies like PPC, classifieds etc, you already might know the value of connecting with the prospect. I use this FREE video email application to connect with my leads as soon as they enter in to my sales funnel.

Networked Blogs: I use this application to increase the visibility for my blog. This is a cool application which allows Facebook users to subscribe to my blog and access my updates regularly.