I was reading the New York Times and came across an article entitled, “How to Market Your Business with Facebook.”
As we work to help our clients reach the right audiences, we are increasingly thinking about Facebook with its audience of more than 300 million active users. As PR practitioners, we are not so interested in the advertising opportunities, rather than providing our clients counsel on the following:
1) How to build online communities of fans;
2) How to take advantage of the tremendous amount of demographic information available on Facebook; and
3) How to leverage traditional media and content on Facebook. There are tremendous opportunities to populate business Facebook pages with product reviews, photos, YouTube videos and more.
If you have a few minutes, I highly encourage you to read the New York Times article. It provides some excellent examples of how other businesses are using Facebook. For instance, a popular cupcake bakery called Sprinkles is using the social media site to drive traffic to its retail stores. They do this by offering its Facebook fans a special code which can be redeemed in the store for a free cupcake. Today the bakery has more than 70,000 fans.
While many organizations are focusing solely on Twitter, I know Facebook will become increasingly more helpful to us as we work with an array of clients looking to seed product to people for their feedback and input. It is almost like a virtual focus group because it allows businesses to access people’s reactions and attitudes to their products.