Using Facebook Business Pages to Promote Your Brand
Today, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook announced that they now have 150 million active users.According to Zuckerberg, “Today, we reached another milestone: 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day.This includes people in every continent—even Antarctica.If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.When we first started Facebook almost five years ago, most of the people using it were college students in the United States.Today, people of all ages—grandparents, parents and children—use Facebook in more than 35 different languages and 170 countries and territories.”
I thought this would be a good time to talk a bit about using Facebook as a tool to promote your brand and engage your clients/customers.First, let’s take a look at some of Facebook’s demographics. Listed are gender, age group, ethnicity, children/no children, household income and highest level of education:
U.S. Traffic stats are below, with estimated monthly traffic at 1.5 billion, and people at 51.6 million:
It’s easy and also free to create a Facebook business page. Invite your clients to join and engage them by posting videos, photos, company news, promotions and discounts, by starting discussion groups, and in some cases, by developing custom applications. Also, you can make your page viewable by everyone, whether they are members of Facebook or not. I’m going to list some Facebook business pages as examples, since I think that’s the best way to demonstrate how powerful this form of brand development can be. These are businesses that have been successful in creating a genuine community for “fans” of their brand and product line.
Timberland’s Virtual Tree Planting Application
Bigelow Tea Fan Page Jeep Fan Page
Victoria’s Secret Pink Fan Page
I’ll follow with an example of what NOT to do with a Facebook business page. It looks like the folks at BMW fell asleep at the wheel after starting these two promotions. The first is an application that never seemed to have gotten off the ground, and the second was called out by users as being unoriginal and even insulting:
To BMW’s credit, they’ve also developed a couple of Facebook pages that have gotten a much better response:
I hope the above examples have been helpful in demonstrating what makes up a good Facebook business page. The main point is to engage, engage, engage. However many fans you have or how large of a company you are, you have to continually interact with your members, give them something new, get them involved, participate, and build a successful online community for your brand.
