Facebook is second only to MySpace in the number of members it has, however it’s built to be a better viral vehicle for marketing. Whether you’re selling a new product or want to get exposure for a social event, it’s very easy to get ‘eyeballs’ on it using Facebook and what’s more it doesn’t cost anything.

The first step would be to set up a Facebook group for your specific product or service and invite all your contacts to join. When your contacts do join, the feed on their friends’ pages will be updated with that fact and will likely lead to a lot of them at the very least visiting the group page to check out if there’s anything of interest for them. “After all if a friend of mine joined a group it’s more than likely it’ll be of interest to me too” is the concept we’re going for here (you want to be sure to have some compelling copy on the group page to make sure your message is getting across to your ideal market to entice people to join). This will carry on for a while and pretty soon the group will have hundreds of members. And by ‘pretty soon’ I mean within weeks.

Whilst this is going on you want to be sure to have a website, preferably with a descriptive domain name that users can relate to the Facebook group, where members can find more details of your product(s) or services or whatever it is you’re marketing. Why? Because the site is under your control; you’re not limited in what information to host on the site or in what manner. Also, having a website allows you to capture the email addresses of your visitors so you can start marketing to them directly.

Drive the members of the group to the website (it could also be a special page you set up on an existing website created just for members of the Facebook group) using teaser information like articles or special offers/discounts. This will lead to more people joining the group so they can take advantage of the special discounts thereby continuing the viral campaign for you.

That’s it! Using this simple method you’ll be driving traffic to your web site in no time.

Here are a few links to help you set something like this up:

1. Hosting and domain name for your site (if you don’t currently have one) – DreamHost
2. A Cynergise article on using descriptive domain names to drive more traffic to your site from Facebook and elsewhere
3. A brilliant email management tool to help you capture and manage your email list for direct marketing

If you’re setting up your Facebook marketing campaign and web site and need some advice don’t hesitate to contact us – we’ll be happy to help.

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3. BSM and The Apprentice – an example of free marketing using an effective email signature

According to statistics reported on page 6 of Singapore’s TODAY paper on August 13, 2007:

• 6 trillion business email messages were sent worldwide last year
• 49 minutes is spent on email each day by the average worker
• 4 hours is spent on email each day by the senior management worker
• 80 percent of email sent is actually spam
• 62 percent of workers check their business email at home or on holiday
• 10 points is the fall in IQ experienced by workers distracted by email (more than twice that found in cannabis studies)

You’ve checked out the stats, so would it be worth exploring how you could get a handle on your email? Here are two tricks that we have already started to use to help guard us from spam and spammer attacks:

(1) Turn Your Email Address Into An Image: When you need to display your email address on your website, you can protect it from being added to a bulk email list by displaying that email address as an image. Use Safe Mail that turns it into an image that looks like text, or check out Email Cover that turns your email address into a CAPTCHA image. These are both free services, and something that we’ll be using on ALL of our websites that display our email addresses.

(2) Use A Spam Blocker: If your email address is already trapped on bulk email lists, there are cool services that you can subscribe to that block out ALL emails that aren’t by known senders. All those messages by unknown sources that fall into your spam folder can be checked occasionally in case a genuine email arrives there, so don’t worry – new contacts can still reach you. This saves you tonnes of time by keeping your attention on those emails that consistently deserve your attention. The spam blocking service we use and highly recommend is Spam Arrest.

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