With the release of its new platform, Facebook’s recent endeavor in social media presents a unique opportunity for marketers, developers and businesses to tap into the social network’s young, active, and viral crowd.
However, over the past few weeks there has been a rising concern among developers to uncover ways to monetize their Facebook applications. The curse of instant online success is that you can no longer sustain expensive servers to support hundreds and thousands (or even millions) of Facebook users.
• Combine your Facebook marketing plan...
....with the strategies that you are best at. If you're good at e-mail marketing, for instance, use Facebook ads to get more e-mail subscribers. If your website converts traffic really well, use your page to drive traffic there. Always plug into what you already know works well for your business. An indirect source of funds: develop applications under contract for third parties. A number of companies have been posting contract jobs over at the Facebook’s developer forums. There exists a large gap in the supply and demand of available Facebook application developers; as a result, finding potential clients to charge reasonable rates should not be a hassle.
• If you're growing fans through Facebook advertising...
...get people to click "Like" right on the ad. You will get a lot cheaper fans that way than if you send them to a fan page through your ad. If you run an ad that sends people to a custom tab because you want to get an opt-in, that's the same thing as sending them to another website, and you may not want to do that. Not everyone will put in their e-mail and click like so you are dividing your efforts. Decide first if you want fans or e-mail subscribers. If you want fans, don't send them directly to a custom tab. Use advertisements, cross-promotion schemes and affiliate marketing. It is not feasible to use Google Adsense for this since Facebook does not allow JavaScript embedding. Adsense may be embedded through iFrames, which despite being popular among Facebook developers, is against Google’s TOS. Affiliate marketing is a great alternative to advertisements; my own source of income on Facebook is generated through Amazon’s affiliate marketing.
• Think of your page as a social e-mail.
There's a chance that followers will see your updates in their feed, but you have to really capture them within your first few posts. There are parallels to e-mail in this strategy; not everyone will open them. If you get a 30 percent open rate, you're doing great. On Facebook you can use the same strategies to do really well. The difference is that with e-mail marketing you don't want to send out e-mails everyday or you will lose your subscribers.
• If you're not sure...
...whether the greatest benefit will come from sending people from your ad to your site, your Facebook opt-in page, or gaining fans through prompting them to click "Like" right on the ad, test them all! See how much it costs you to acquire a fan, and how much traffic you get from those fans, versus the cost of acquiring an e-mail and the ROI on that e-mail address.
• Engage with your fans in your posts.
Don't make every post a call to action. You want to turn the folks who like your page into true fans of your brand.
• Boring Facebook pages won't get you far.
If your business isn't something that most people would consider exciting, like culture, lifestyle sports, animals, dating, kids – or anything that people get gushy about—go the opt-in route rather than the fan marketing route. If your business is attractive to many consumers, use pictures in your ads to entice them to click like. If your brand allows you the creative freedom to toss in a picture of a puppy, cat or baby, you’re golden! People will click on your ad.
• Remember one of the key differences...
...between using AdWords and Facebook advertising. That is, in order to generate revenue through online advertising, you must reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time, with the right offer. It's possible to do this with AdWords and Facebook ads. The main difference is that AdWords is about fulfilling demand: finding the small set of people who are ready to buy, or very close to it, and capitalizing on finding people at that stage of the sales funnel. With Google you are targeting people by what they are looking for. With Facebook you are targeting them by who they are and what they like. These are people who are likely to buy from you at some point which is a larger group of people. There's more sales potential overall. But be careful not to spend too much money on people who are going to wait three or four years to buy, unless you have a sales cycle that is naturally that long. But you may be able to get them to buy sooner than they would have by posting enticing posts or with compelling conversion practices on your website.
• Facebook page insights...
...can be a great resource to learn about your audience. You'll find this tab on your admin panel on Facebook in the left hand column. Look at the graphs that tell you how many people are liking you per day, how many people are talking about you, sharing your posts, etc. Notice what type of posts get more engagement than others and create more like them. Know your audience, put yourself in their shoes and engage them!
• Develop applications solely for the purpose of selling them to interested parties. Several applications have already been acquired in this fashion; the most recent example is that of Mozes’ purchase of TextMe. Sell services within Facebook through micro-payment transactions. PayPal payments made for accessing premium services could potentially yield reasonable income depending on the application’s purpose, size, and prospective users.
0 comments:
Post a Comment