Online marketing is an art because it requires certain kickass attitude. Just like Facebook marketing. On Facebook, music upload sharing, image postings, link pushing, and video promotion do not make the cut in grabbing a passerby's attention to get them to like your fan page. You need something more, it's the power to make people believe you are worth it.
Facebook Marketing
The new Facebook for business is living proof that the website is still fighting for its bread-and-butter despite backlashes in stock trading, the recent email fiasco, IBM advertising pullout, and criticisms thrown on F-commerce as a whole. Despite many disheartening views on Facebook marketing written and spoken by many key people in the social media marketing industry, the fact still stands that there's a significant number of small businesses with Facebook pages (9.2 million in September 2011 in the US alone) and there have been hefty success stories to this day.
Icons like Coca-Cola and Starbucks have Facebook pages and advertising campaigns on the site using brilliant schemes and content that hallmarks the way advertising is done. For more inspiration, you can browse through the most successful campaigns on Facebook.
With Facebook spending great brainpower to revamp its business site, any small business looking to reach out to its niche's population can be assured they can create their own relationships with customers at incredible scale.
Why Facebook Fans Are Essential To Your Business
I couldn't understand why many CEOs and executives out there are bashing out marketing on Facebook and growing a fan base. They mainly argue that Facebook advertising and keeping a Facebook page are futile efforts in marketing either because it's "untargeted" or "cannot be measured in specific ROI". They propose that there should be a social data system of record and standard social media measures that translates social data into a positive or a negative return on investment (ROI).
But does it matter, really? Social media activities and human behavior online, especially when correlated with advertising influence, are be hard to quantify, measure or trace to a specific result that meets a goal like sales.
However, the numbers show that 50% of small business owners reported gaining new customers through Facebook and 51% of Facebook users said they are more likely to buy from brands they follow.
Brands gain the highest exposure from social media than utilizing other conventional marketing forms because of its many-to-many interaction as opposed to one-to-one or one-to-many relationships inherent in traditional forms of marketing.
Many-to-many describes the communication paradigm that exists in social media where people both contribute and receive information, and share that information across different websites.