Utilizing Facebook for your Business
Recently Facebook released their own personal guide to using Facebook as a venue for viral marketing. You can check out their work here, but I think their work was a little bit skewed to focus using Facebook ads. While that’s completely understandable, considering that’s their business plan, all of us at Intrigo still think that there are many ways for businesses to utilize Facebook, and most business have yet to really tap into it.
The biggest benefit of marketing through Facebook is the automatic generation of word of mouth via the News Feed. This means that any interaction a person has with your brand gets blasted to every single one of their friends. The challenge, as a business, is to give potential customers and Facebook users a reason to interact with your brand on Facebook. The easiest way to do this is by playing up the psychographic aspects of your brand in your Facebook interactions.
The psychographic elements of your company are the elements of your company that you want people to identify with. Essentially, it’s the personality of your company. In order to have successful marketing via Facebook, you need to create a “face” and personality for your company that people can become “friends” with. This type of relationship is easy to see with lifestyle brands, things such as clothing companies, restaraunts, and clubs that really play on psychographics for their marketing plan. For example, I wear lululemon clothes because I enjoy yoga and pilates, and that lifestyle. As a Facebook user, I would become a fan of lululemon to tell all my friends about this part of myself. Or, I really believe in the OpenID movement, and I want to become a fan of Vidoop so my friends know about the work they’re doing.
In order to best market on Facebook and other social media, you need to create your company’s personality. Whether it’s a cause such as being green, a lifestyle, or a culture, personalities are what people can best identify with in a social environment. Then you can connect with customers that have the same personality, and best suited to you as a company.
