By John Eberhard

Facebook can be a very effective tool in marketing a business today. There are two primary ways to market using Facebook:

1. Create a Facebook business page, then get people to “like” the page. The people who like the page will potentially see the things you post on the page. Then post to the page regularly.
2. Run paid ads on Facebook, usually taking people to a page on your website where they can buy something or inquire about paid services or products.

Create a Facebook business page, then get people to “like” the page

The first trick in following this strategy is to get a lot of people to “like” your Facebook page. By a lot, I mean at least 1,000 to 2,000 people or more.

This is usually done by running a paid ad campaign on Facebook that is specifically geared towards getting people to like your page. It is best to run a campaign for $3-5 per day, and just let it run for months.

I have recently run these campaigns for clients and for my own business and gotten new likes in volume for roughly $0.50-1.35 each. So a monthly campaign with a modest budget of just $100-135 can get you 100 or more new likes per month. There are various tools to allow you to target people in a certain geographical area, or using other demographics.

Also, within your personal profile, you can ask your Facebook friends to like a business fan page. And some will.

So while you’re building up the likes on your business page, what do you post and how often? For how often, ideally you should post something every day. But minimally you should post something 2-3 times per week.

Then what types of things should you post on Facebook? Here are some ideas.

1. Post your blog posts. There is a feature in WordPress (if your site is in WordPress) called a featured image, which can be set for every blog post and page. Once you set a featured image, all you have to do is copy and paste the URL of your blog post to Facebook and it will automatically pull in and display that featured image, as well as a link to the blog post.
2. Post links to select pages of your website, such as individual product or service pages, testimonial pages, about us pages, portfolio pages, and newsletter subscription pages, or other pages offering free information products such as ebooks. Once again be sure to have a featured image set for each page.
3. Post your company videos. You can just copy and paste the URL of your YouTube videos. But if you actually upload the video file to Facebook (which takes longer of course), they will display the video in the news feed and it will start playing (without sound) as the person scrolls over it. They can click on the video to hear the sound. The fact that the video starts playing will attract more attention of course.
4. Post a link to your YouTube channel, and ask people to subscribe to it.
5. Post promoting any events, sales or specials you have going.
6. Post testimonials or testimonial videos.
7. You can post links to articles written by others that are of interest to your public.
8. You can post quotes from the founder of your company, but be careful because this can easily be overdone.
9. Post about any news about your company.
10. You can also do what is called a “Facebook Live,” which is like a live webinar that then gets posted to your Facebook page. These usually get pretty good interaction.

It used to be that every person who liked your page would then see your posts. Then several years ago Facebook changed their system so that only 15-20% of the people who liked a fan page would see the posts. Many people didn’t like that change, but the point is still that you need lots of people liking your fan page.

One other point is that you can “boost” your posts, so that they go out to your entire list of people who have liked the page, or you can target others using Facebook’s targeting tools. Boosting costs money of course, but not much.

Run paid ads on Facebook

You can run ads on Facebook promoting any product or service. The ad can link to any page that you want, usually a landing page off of Facebook where they can buy or inquire about a product or service you are selling.

You can target people in one geographical area, or by a variety of other factors:

Demographics: You can target people by their education level, by their income or net worth, whether they are homeowners or by their home type, by life events like a birthday or anniversary or their being away from home, if they have a new job or are in a new relationship, newly married, or recently moved. You can target people who are parents. You can also target people by their politics. You can target people in a certain industry or with a specific job title.

Interests: You can target people who have specific interests, like interest in a specific industry, or things like entertainment, family and relationships, fitness and wellness, food and drink, hobbies, shopping and fashion, sports and outdoors, or technology.

Behaviors: You can target users of specific mobile phone brands, people who recently bought a car, owners of specific car brands, people who made charitable donations and in what categories, people who have a specific operating system or use a specific browser, people who are expats from various countries, people who are investors of various types, you can select African Americans, Asians, or Hispanics, you can select people who have made recent purchases and in specific categories such as sports or household or technology, and you can select people who are recent home buyers or recent mortgage borrowers.