9 Hot Tips for Small Business Marketing on Facebook
By Christine Erickson, Mashable

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

 

With 845 million users, Facebook has become an increasingly useful tool for brands, and it’s important to have a strong presence on the social network.

Whether your brand is fully established or just starting out, launching a marketing campaign can seem overwhelming. But, it doesn’t have to be a timely or expensive process. There are several small and simple things you can do for your brand on Facebook. In fact, some of these marketing tactics are used by the biggest brands in the world.

Ready for your brand to get in front of the 845 million? Majestic Media, a global Facebook marketing agency, has come up with nine time-saving tips for marketing on Facebook.

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1. See if Your Vanity URL Is Available

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Before you launch your brand presence on Facebook, you need to make sure that your vanity URL is available — and that it’s simple and easy to remember.

Rather than going through the time consuming process of manually figuring out what’s available and what’s not, use a simple but powerful service called Name Vine. It checks domain names, Facebook and Twitter extensions in a matter of seconds to see if your desired vanity URL is available.

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2. Use a Third-Party Platform to Distribute Social Content

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Copying and pasting content, logging in from one social media network and logging out from another can be a time consuming task — but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re looking to push content to Facebook and other social networks, you can benefit from using a tool like HootSuite, which allows you to publish once and distribute everywhere. You can integrate your Facebook Page, Twitter account, Google+ page, LinkedIn profile and other social networks — all within one easy-to-use interface.

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3. Use an Application Publishing Platform

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For small and medium-sized businesses, social media budgets are nowhere close to those of global brands, which can afford multiple custom applications and promotions on Facebook. However, large budgets aren’t required to launch a lot of the basic applications seen on Facebook.

Services such as North Social and Pagemodo provide the kinds of applications that most businesses need. Also, most of these services provide a “freemium” model that offers some applications for free. Keep in mind that you won’t get a customized app, but you can manage the content and visuals within pre-developed apps that are available. This may be a good first step into the Facebook world if your budget is a main concern.

If you do decide to launch some of these applications, you should set up the following applications/tabs:

A Welcome Page: This should be the default landing page that welcomes a user to an application. Typically, these pages are fan-gated, meaning the person is asked to “like” the page to unveil more content.
A Contact Us Page: This is a great and useful tool for converting your fans into potential sales leads.
You should set up at least one or two tab applications on your Facebook Page, so users aren’t landing on your Facebook wall, but rather a page that’s informative, engaging and able to convert those users into fans.

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4. Utilize Social Plugins Wherever Possible

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The most underutilized (free) tools are Facebook social plugins. A new study from Gigya shows that users who visit third-party sites through Facebook Connect spend 50% more time on those sites. Furthermore, those users view twice as many pages. The numbers speak for themselves.

Aside from use on third-party sites, social plugins can also be utilized on Facebook apps to provide a deeper level of engagement, while driving traffic back to the application. Above, you’ll see the Facebook application Majestic Media built for Volkswagen, which invited users to participate in the next Volkswagen commercial. It was utilized to build meaningful conversations within the application, while driving new social traffic to the campaign.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is — leverage the social plugins on your blog, Facebook apps and on your website. They’re free to use and are a quick and easy way to market your brand or message through referral traffic.

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5. Find Out When and What to Post on Facebook

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If you’re looking to see what your fans engage with the most — and when to post it on Facebook — you can utilize a third-party service called Edgerank Checker.

This time-saving application grades your fan page and determines the following key factors:

Most effective day of the week to post content
Popular keywords that drive engagement
What type of media is best for your audience
How often to update

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6. Use Facebook Insights

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If you have to provide a report of Facebook metrics to your boss or a client — or maybe you just want to see for yourself — the best time-saving tip is to export the Facebook Insights data to an Excel spreadsheet. You can see which status updates performed best, whether your audience responds well to video and get a sense of what’s driving your Likes.

You can do this by clicking the “Export Data” button. In the pop-up that appears, select the data type and date range.

Once you’ve done this and downloaded the file, open it in Excel and apply a filter by going to the data tab and clicking on “Filter.” You have to make sure that your cursor is at the very top row. In the example, we’ve chosen the “Lifetime Post Total Reach” metric to filter by.

Once this filter is selected, you can quickly filter any key metrics in ascending or descending order, which is a very powerful trick when analyzing your Facebook marketing and engagement efforts.

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7. Provide Local Content

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Nobody wants to visit a Facebook Page with an enticing offer, only to learn that it’s not available in their region. Nor do they want to land on a brand page where all the content is in another language.

Here are some quick strategies for providing localized content:

Give your fans an incentive to visit your business by providing them with a recent, active “walk-in” promotion in their area.
Allow users to recognize that you are connected with their location by providing details and assets specific to where they are.
Geotarget your posts even if you don’t have multiple locations — you wouldn’t want to offer a walk-in special to your fans in New York if your business is in Los Angeles
When you have to target languages, Facebook allows you to make status updates for users with certain language settings. So, Facebook users who have French or Spanish as their default language on the site will only see your content that’s in their native tongue.

1. Click on “Custom”
2. A pop-up will come up that will look like this:
3. Once you’ve entered your specific targeting information, you can hit “Okay” and proceed with your status update, geared for that specific audience. It’s local and relevant for those language settings selected.

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8. Create a QR Code for Your Facebook Fan Page

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Setting up a QR code for your Facebook Page is a quick, simple and effective strategy for small or large businesses to use. QR codes can be leveraged on napkins, menus, business cards, billboards, magazines, brochures and other forms of marketing materials.
Esponce is one of the most powerful QR code platforms on the market, and it offers a free tier that’s typically geared to small businesses.

The process takes no more than a few minutes to set up and allows you to:

Create a custom QR code
Embed your logo into the QR code
Link your QR code to a dynamic URL — so you can customize and change the URL if you decide you want to later drive users to your website instead of your Facebook Page.
You’ll have the ability to view analytics so you can see how many people have scanned your code, their location and the type of smartphone that scanned the image.

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9. Buy Facebook Ads

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Buying Facebook ads is a wise, cost-effective solution that can help increase your brand’s visibility throughout the Facebook platform. Most people don’t realize how easy they are to set up or that you can buy in with a small ad spend. A budget of $50 per month would be sufficient for a small business to make some waves.

Facebook’s “Like” ads provide users the opportunity to “like” your fan page from any page they are on. If a user doesn’t click on the “Like” button, don’t interpret that as your campaign not working — these ads are relevant because they keep users engaged and informed with the latest in your marketing campaign. Think of them as a brand awareness play — just because they aren’t clicked, doesn’t mean they’re not acknowledged.

More recently, one of the best ways to invest in Facebook advertising is by leveraging Sponsored Stories. According to a study by TBG Digital, Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories ad units nabbed a 46% higher click-through rate, a 20% lower cost per click and an 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ad units.