Example Business Uses Of Facebook
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Online Advertising, Small Business Advertising, Small Business Marketing, social media
Recently I did a series of posts on how to setup a Facebook fan page as well as a few other Facebook fan page how to examples. After doing those I thought it may be good to list a few examples of various types of businesses taking advantage of the promotion that Facebook allows.
Here are a few to show the varied ways businesses are using Facebook pages:
Auto Spa Car Wash - I posted about this the other day and thought this was a good example of how a business, in the case a car wash, uses Facebook to promote their events, specials, and other offerings. This just shows with a bit of creativity almost any kind of business can take advantage of the social network effect.
Eagle Valley Golf Course - Someone the other day gave me some great examples of how they had seen golf courses using Twitter and Facebook. Here is a solid example of a course with good group of friends. Perfect example of promoting events and special discounts online through their Facebook page to get people booking tee times.
Car Dealership - Here is a dealership posting customer reviews as well as video reviews of various cars. Once again directly connecting with their fans and keeping a positive message out there. There were many bad car dealership examples, people with one post or 2 fans. Seems like alot of them jumped on the bandwagon but never had anyone help them take advantage of the initial motivation.
Ford Fusion - On a much larger scale here is an example of a company like Ford, who I continue to see using social media in various ways (they use Twitter quite a bit too but that is another post). In this case they are promoting their go green and hybrid initiatives while promoting their Ford Fusion Hybrid. I think much of the value here is customers posting actual comments on the page. Nice job by an old school company.
LIFT Coffee Shop - This is a business that gets it, great use, using it to promote their menu items, specials. They post constantly keeping their hundreds of followers connected. Local coffee shops are places that people tend to connect with and hang out in, they get attached. This is a way to keep that going even outside of the shop.
As businesses start to use more than just advertising and their websites to promote their business I think it is very important to stay in touch with how they are using it. It is easy for those of us that have lived in an online word to just say, yeah everyone uses it, it is the next great thing. But I find it even more important to actually step back and take a look at how, and why it works for some and not others.
Facebook Being Used To Promote The Most Offline Business
Filed under: Domain News, Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Low Cost Marketing, Online Advertising, Small Business Advertising, Small Business Marketing, rural advertising, social media
I had to go no further than 1 mile from my house to find an example of an offline business starting to take advantage of social networking, in this case Facebook, to promote it's business. I was heading to dinner last night when I happened to see a sign at the car wash sign (see pictures to left, ignore spelling error) asking people to become of a fan of their Facebook page.
As a big proponent of using all the various tools a business has online to create a holistic marketing solution it was nice to see a business that is about as offline as you can get using social networking to promote themselves. I will become a fan because I think it will be a nice case study in an offline business using social networking.
As a domain investor it causes me slight concern, more and more I am seeing businesses promote themselves only with their Facebook page. We can all stand up and say no way can this effect us, but it does at some level, maybe not in a major way but in some minor way the more people start putting their Facebook or Twitter URLs on signs instead of their domain names in some minor little way it has an effect, there is no way to deny this if you are thinking rationally. I do not like it but it is what it is.
All that said, kudos to this small business owner in rural Missouri using all avenues to promote his business and offerings. On a side note, Nov 12th we are doing a seminar talking about just this topic to the local Chamber of Commerce member and surrounding town businesses. Seems like their may be a sympathetic ear or two in the audience...
How To Promote Your Facebook Fan Page
Filed under: Domain Development, Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Small Business Marketing, social media
After my two posts concerning how to create a Facebook fan page and then how to set your Facebook fan page username I thought it only proper to finish off the series with a post on how to promote your Facebook fan page once you had it up and running. Here are the ways that have been found to be most effective, feel free to leave a comment with ways you have found effective in promoting your fan page after launching yours, if you have a new domain development and want a low cost way to promote your site a fan page is a great way to start:
Suggest to friends - This is the easiest way and should be the first thing you do after creating your page and making it public. You can do this right from the fan page. The only problem with this is that you have to select each friend individually which can be a bit time consuming if you have a lot of friends on Facebook. You will see the suggest to friends link on the left menu bar of the fan page.
Promotional graphic or icon - You can do this much like you do for a personal Facebook account, add a graphic to your website that says Find Us On Facebook. This works very well since you know the fans you get are truly interested in your site since they came from your site. This allows you to promote and target products to people that have interest from the beginning.
Blog about it - If you have a blog or a site that has the ability to add content why not announce your fan page. This is something I am getting ready to do with one of my sites.
Business cards - This is something that I am noticing more and more, people are including their Twitter and Facebook links on their business cards. This is a great way to promote your online world with old school leave behinds like a business card. I will be adding Facebook page links to my next set of business cards.
Email signatures - This is something I did for Twitter and still do with my blog at times, when I send business emails I will include an extended signature with my Facebook, Twitter, and blog links. Another free way to promote your brand.
Facebook advertising - Facebook makes it easy to promote your page, I did this with the Missouri.me fan page for the first day to gain a few more fans. This is easy to setup and was effective.
For guidelines on what you can and cannot do to promote your Facebook fan page or to download the Facebook badge to put on your site check this link: Facebook promotional guidelines.
Setting Your Facebook Username On A Fan Page
Setting your Facebook username for a fan page is just as important as setting it up for your personal account. I have noticed many people have overlooked this step when creating their fan pages so thought I would point out the details here real quick. It is an easy task but has a few caveats around it before you can do it. I did have some of this detail in my post about Creating A Facebook Fan Page but it was deep in the post and I had enough email questions and comments about the username specifically I though it best to do a quick post on it.
To set your Facebook username go to Facebook.com/username
When you get here sometimes it is not obvious immediately that you can set the fan page username, if you look just below the yellow box concerning your personal username you will see a sentence that says Set a username for your pages. If you click that link you will then have the option to set the name. This will allow you to select a keyword or other specific word or phrase that describes your fan page rather than the long URL created when you first build your page.
Keep in mind, this is a one time shot, they make this very clear. Check and double check your selection. After you do make your selection I have noticed that the page access can be unstable for several minutes to a half hour after making the change. Its worth it.
Make sure after you have made the change that you go change the link on any of your fan page links from your site that you are promoting since they old link will no longer work.
On a side note, this pages do very well in SEO, I have noticed that both the ifones.com fan page and Missouri.me fan page both rank well for certain terms. This can be good to gather new fans to promote your site too.