Facebook is currently the most visited and popular social network, with over 400 million active users that generate more than 300 billion page views per month, which is more than Google gets in the United States. And ever since the network was created and started being popular, Internet marketers tried to find ways to make money off of it by promoting various products.
When Facebook introduced their ads platform, things became much easier and a lot of marketers started creating their campaigns on Facebook. But still, the number of Facebook advertisers is a lot lower than, for example, the number of people using AdWords or AdCenter, which are Google’s and Microsoft’s pay per click advertising platforms, respectively.
Now, think about it: Facebook in the United States gets more views to their pages than Google does, while at the same time having much less competing advertisers using the ads platform. If that isn’t the best mix for any marketer (especially those who are just starting out and don’t have hundreds or even tens of thousands of dollars to spend), I don’t know what does.
The demographics on Facebook are just as diverse as on Google, if not more, because a lot of non-tech savvy people are using it to communicate with their friends (and they haven’t developed the sort of ad blindness and skepticism as seasoned Internet surfers, which is simply great for marketers).
You do need to get creative when making the ads and targeting the right people, but the investments can pay off very quick. If you’re new to Facebook advertising, but you did your research, you’ll most likely find that the easiest way to get started is by using fan pages. They’re simple pages where users of a certain product, fans of a movie/song and other people that have something in common meet and communicate.
Once you establish such a page, you’ll not only be able to get a good conversion from Facebook ads, but also get traffic from all the search engines on relevant keywords, and Facebook always ranks very high. The secret to keeping the visitors coming back is to post good, informative and entertaining content as often as possible.
That is completely up to you, and if you want to succeed, you will do it, but there are a few great Facebook apps that you can use to improve, accelerate and automate your fan page campaign.
Static FBML. If you want a successful fan page, you have to make it appealing to the visitors. Customizing it for a theme (of a movie, for example) and making it more unique than any others will ensure that visitors keep coming back. This app allows you to go beyond the default Facebook customization options. Using HTML and FBML (FaceBook Markup Language) you can change practically everything on any of you fan pages.
Promotions. This Facebook app is a great tool that will help you create and manage great marketing campaigns on your fan pages. You can create sweepstakes, offer coupons, run contests and giveaways and do other things that can help you a lot in promoting anything.
Signup Form. If you’re a savvy marketer that thinks of the future, you most likely know that “the secret is in the list”, as they say. An email list will help you get closer to your customers and have a customer base long after the product or fan page are discontinued and even after Facebook ceases to exist 
. This app lets you to insert any type of sign up form on a fan page. You can have users sign up for your newsletter or directly for the service you’re promoting.
Posted Items Pro. This nifty Facebook app will help you somewhat automate the “posting good content regularly” part of maintaining your fan page in top shape. It allows you to post not only usual text, but also images and videos from Flickr, Youtube and other sites, which will ensure that the users spend more time on the fan page. You can post the content manually or let the app do it for you (especially useful when you’re away for a while with no access to a computer or the Internet).
iEndorse. Reputation is everything for a business and their products. With this app, you can help your customers and yourself by allowing them to post testimonials about your product and discuss it with other buyers. If your service is good and the users like it, having real verifiable testimonials will skyrocket your conversions, sales and, of course, profits.
There are a lot of other apps like this (just search for them), but the above are the best for marketing purposes. If you’re just starting out and trying to create a couple of popular fan pages, you’ll definitely find that the above apps can be quite helpful.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Article Source: Article-Marketer.biz Article directory
Need your articles distributed? Maximum exposure with Article-Marketer.biz article submission service.
