Although it has been around only for five years, Facebook has managed to divide the masses as to whether it is a valuable tool of gaining personal or business exposure or simply a waste of time.

Since 2004 that it was initially launched, Facebook has been criticized for many things, but mostly for being a source of destruction that can turn Facebook users into real social networking addicts. Stalking people, hacking into accounts, getting too much involved with unknown people and being deprived from real life are some of the broadly recognized negative effects of Facebook. On the other hand though, Facebook offers quite a variety of opportunities including catching up with old friends, meeting new people, supporting important causes, finding valuable information and promoting own work and business.

As a matter of fact, Facebook is a great tool for marketing your business and driving more inbound traffic and leads. Considering that Facebook is a huge online community with over 200 million active users out of whom 100 million log on at least once each day, it comes as no surprise that Facebook can meet your business goals.

If you are a business owner looking to promote your products and services, if you want to connect and engage with current and prospect customers, if you want to create a community around your business or if you simply want to promote other types of content such as webinars, blogs and so on, Facebook is the place for you. For many users before you, Facebook has been a true gold mine if you are really interested in advertising your business and creating brand awareness.

Although Facebook has been mainly designed as a personal social network, it has evolved into a B2B (business-to-business) networking and marketing platform that can support the marketing and promotional efforts of contemporary businesses and entrepreneurs. With the same philosophy that own networks of Facebook users grow contact by contact, the B2B community grows, offering the opportunity of personal branding and advertising targeted to business sectors.

Whether operating on B2B or B2C (business-to-consumer), Facebook tends to be simpler, transactional, and product-oriented. To take advantage of Facebook’s enormous potential and be able to publicize and promote your business, you need to take some major steps.

The first step to take is to create an engaging business Page. Remember: Profiles are for people; Pages are for businesses. The main advantage of Pages over Profiles is that Pages are, by default, public and they will start ranking in public search results offering your business immediate exposure. Besides, Pages can be classified into distinct categories enabling your business to be listed in relevant search results. Also, Pages allow you to designate multiple administrators so that you have multiple people to manage your account. Even if one person leaves the company, you can still have control over the Page. After you have created your page, you can use as many applications as possible so that you give users a reason to become fans of your Page.

A good alternative to a Facebook Page is creating or joining a Facebook Group.  Groups allow you to discuss topics of your interest and to exchange opinions with other users that share similar views. In effect, Facebook Groups function like mini forums, where all people can be invited to join. However, Groups are not indexed, and they do not appear in public searches, so users cannot join if they do not know they exist. Automatically, this narrows down your chances to be tracked down and found by prospect customers. Besides, Facebook Groups support only basic applications such as Events, Discussions, Wall, Links, Photos and Videos, whereas Facebook Pages support almost all applications.

The added value of creating an engaging Page is that any sort of activity in the page is posted in the fans’ news fees, which is visible by all of their Facebook contacts. This gives super exposure to your Page considering that every time a Facebook user logs into their account, they see their contacts’ recent activity, so your Page’s activity is visible by a great part of Facebook’s network, especially if you have many contacts.

As soon as you create your page, it will be publicly searchable, by default. Do not change this feature because this allows your Page to be indexed by search engines. This will drive more inbound traffic and leads to your Page.

Finally, using Facebook ads is a great way to give your Page an extra boost. Facebook ads allow you to advertise a website or content by using a broad range of management tools that are easy to implement on an interface that is similar to the Google Adwords interface. Cost per click (CPC) and Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) advertising can increase your business exposure enormously. Make sure to add social actions as well because they demonstrate related connections to the viewer of your ad. For instance, if you are viewing an ad for company X and your friend John is a fan of company X on Facebook, that ad could show on John’s photo saying he is a fan of company X. By being related to John, you can improve the click through rate of your ad.

The truth of the matter is that, if you are not strategically marketing your business on Facebook, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Your friends and their friends and the friends of their friends are the core of your business and Facebook tools and applications are the means that can market your efforts to the top. All you need to do is start working on Facebook promotions before someone else takes you over.

I work as a financial and investment advisor but my passion is writing, music and photography. Writing mostly about finance, business and music, being an amateur photographer and a professional dj, I am inspired from life.

Being a strong advocate of simplicity in life, I love my family, my partner and all the people that have stood by me with or without knowing. And I hope that someday, human nature will cease to be greedy and demanding realizing that the more we have the more we want and the more we satisfy our needs the more needs we create. And this is so needless after all.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/tips-on-using-facebook-to-publicize-your-business-1040942.html

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