If you’re like many small business owners who want to take advantage of social networking as a marketing tool, building a Facebook page is a good place to start.

New York Times business columnist Kermit Pattinson offers the following tips for launching a Facebook page and using it to market your business:

1.Start small and hone in on your main objective. Are you trying to build brand awareness? Create an online customer service site? Or maybe you want to focus on direct sales. Ask your friends, family and best customers to sign up as a fan of your page when it launches so it can begin to grow by word-of-mouth. Because there are so many tools available on Facebook, you can quickly get off track. Make sure your content is lively and the page reflects the personality of your business.

2.Don’t think of the page as just a sales tool – use it to interact with customers by asking for information and responding to their complaints. Keep content fresh with status updates and newsfeeds to tell fans about specials, events, contests or anything else of interest. This can take a lot of time but the payoff is often worth it.

3.Facebook allows for better target marketing. Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and more so you can get your message to your target market. When you create an ad, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly. Advertisers can choose to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates. The Facebook ad system also provides instant feedback with metrics like the number of impressions and clicks-through.

Tags: brand awareness, customer service, Facebook, Facebook page, small business owners, social networking, target marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 12:53 am and is filed under Marketing tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.