Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Book review: Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses

Hopefully, the end of the month is the right time for the freelancer to read and discover new valuable resources for improving his or her work. Yesterday evening I discovered that I have on my Kindle a book about Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses and decided that it is the right time for a useful lecture. 
The book belongs to the category of what I call 'anchor books': in the search for new customers, you need to offer as many credentials as possible and thus, a book or more plus an updated website will help you to improve your pitch. Nothing despicable in this case and the advantages of many books and articles from this category are that free of charge or in exchange for a very low price you can read a lot of insightful ideas about a variety of domains.
The book was published at the end of December 2011 and most probably there are many things that Facebook changed since then and in less than one year the book will need an improvement. However, if you are looking for a fast lecture - of around 30 pages - and useful ideas, you should take a break for an hour and read it.
What are my lessons learned?
As for the moment I am not too much involved in social media projects, I got almost all the technical information I was looking for about Facebook Fan Pages and the advantages of using Facebook advertising for businesses.
Randomly, some of the best advices at the end of the lecture:
- The Fan Pages should contain only professional/business related information. The post should be regular - but not as frequent as in the case of Twitter, for instance -, entertaining and addressed to the current and prospective community. You need to set up a plan of posts for at least one month in advance, outlining various aspects of your business. A 'like' is not enough, you should be ready to start and be a part of a conversation.
- Regardless of your object of activity, you should always connect with your community. Thus, before you start writing, you should know what is the profile of your target, to establish the demographics and the main interests.
- If you want to expand your community, the Facebook fan page should be used as a reference to your website and, in general, as part of your general business communication.
There are many ideas that I will explore further soon and thanks to this book I am able to continue the journey through the social media jungle. 

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