Your Facebook Page = Free Advertising

Using social media is an important element of any advertising strategy for businesses to both reach and attract new customers online. According to USA Today, “More than 300,000 businesses — one-third of them small businesses — have a presence on Facebook”.

Now with Facebook’s recently updated page layout, businesses can use it to create free advertising for themselves says Thomas Meloche of entrepenuer.com. In is his article “5 Ways to Transform Facebook Page Apps into Free Advertisements“, Meloche presents the ways in which businesses are able to create free advertising content to attract customers using the application features on a regular Facebook page.

 

His five points are:

1. Make the page apps images attention grabbing

2. Use your cover page to draw attention to the ad

3. Tell them an interesting story

4. Ask them to take action

5. Collect information

 

To me each of these points are geared toward creating a page that engages users and encourages participation. Each point is relatively easy to implement, since creating interesting ad pieces and ways to engage users is the only work that needs to be done, rather than having to work on and create an entire page layout

Additionally, when trying to create free advertising on a Facebook page, one can look to other pages and see how other companies and brands are targeting and engaging their customers by looking at posts, apps, images, and cover pages for inspiration.

A Facebook page I feel that best represents all of of Meloche’s five points is MTV‘s Facebook page. On MTV’s page, the cover photo is used to promote the upcoming 2012 MTV VMA show. Beneath their cover photo are various app pages promoting the award show that also allow users to interact on the page by either voting for their favorite artist or tracking social activity relating to the VMA’s, with each category labeled in bold type-faces and colors.

To generate user participation, MTV encourages their fans to enter contests, post their thoughts on the VMA nominees, and share their page content. One example of generating user participation was asking fans to follow MTV and post a VMA tagged video saying why they should win a contest to see recording artist Rihanna and the VMA pre-show.

MTV can then use information that fans submit for contests and prizes, to generate targeted ads to their audience on Facebook. By creating an attention grabbing and engaging page, MTV easily able to advertise and promote its upcoming award show in a stylish and effective way.

Articles Cited:

Meloche, Thomas. (2012, August 14). 5 Ways to Transform Facebook Page Apps into Free Advertisements. Retrieved from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224179.

Swartz, Jon. (2009, August 8). More marketers use social networking to reach customers. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-08-27-social-networks-marketers_N.htm