Are you ready for a Marketing Idea for your Small Business that can truly help increase your exposure and potential sales volume?

How about a marketing tactic that is so strong that is costs absolutely nothing to implement?

What I am talking about is utilizing one of the fastest growing social networks around, Facebook.

Let’s look at these stats before you dismiss this earth moving idea.

Facebook has more than 500 million users, let me write that out…. 500,000,000 (that is a lot of laser targeted traffic)

Over 50% of those users log on to Facebook in any given day, 250,000,000 live in person each and every day.

The average user has 130 friends.  Why is this important?  This is one of the many huge benefits of Facebook.  Because Facebook is a social network, if one of your friends where to mention something about your local business on their page, ALL of their friends would see it.  Get the picture?  Cross promotion and a potential viral campaigns can happen without you doing that much.

Finally, don’t think people spend much time on Facebook, get this, people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, 700 BILLION.

Let’s whip out the calculator and see what that means per user.

700,000,000,000 minutes divided by 500,000,000 users = 1,400 minutes each month or 47 minutes a day.

That my friends is a captive audience if I do say so myself.

Now, how can you take advantage of this powerful new tool?

Here is a simple 3 step plan you can use today to take advantage of Facebook.

Step 1 – Create an account at Facebook (www.facebook.com)

Step 2- Find all of your friend who are probably already on Facebook and make them your friend)

Step 3 – Post cool stuff, not sales nonsense that no one will pay attention to

This will get the ball rolling with your marketing efforts.  Here is a little more advice on step 3 posting cool stuff.

You want to add value to people lives, you want to make a post like this:

“Come to Jimmy’s Pizza, we have the best pizza in town”

Think about it this way, would you yell that out if you were at a party with friends?  I would hope not.

Treat everyone as a friend and just give cool updates.  Make things cool and fun.

Here is a simple tactic, why not run a little contest or a survey. You could put a post on your Facebook page like this:

“So my wife and I are having a debate, I think that pepperoni pizza is by far the best pizza there is, she likes sausage, what is your favorite type of pizza?”

What this does is it engages your friends that are on your list.  You will be making a cool statement in general, also, you will be doing some market research to see what kind of pizza’s sell well with your local market.

Now how could you turn that into money, right, that is the reason we are doing this to begin with.

Here is what you could do:

This would happen a few days later after you had enough day to declare a clear winner, of the type of pizza most people liked.

You could make a post like this:

“It looks like the majority has spoken and we have settle the pizza debate.  The winner by majority is a sausage pizza, looks like my wife is right.  Given the fact I lost, I want to extend a personal invitation to all of our friends to come and enjoy a large sausage pizza for just 5 bucks at out pizza shop Jimmy’s Pizza.  Just mention the sausage pizza debate on Facebook to get your 5 dollar special.”

See how simple that was, we did not hard sell anything, we did not advertise.  We engaged people with a cool little friendly contest and then we rewarded people with a special.  Why did we do the special, because the “mini event” was over.  People like to be part of events and you made them by voting.

Try this local tactic and let me know how it works out for you.

If you need more help with setting up Facebook, please do not hesitate to contact me or my team.

Talk soon,

Keith

**All statistics were provided by Facebook.com

Tweet This

Username: Password: