By John Eberhard

In my recent article I covered marketing on Facebook using their pay-per-click advertising system, which is unique and allows you to target the people who will see the ads according to various demographic factors.

There are a number of other options for marketing on Facebook, which are very good and you need to know about.

Pages

Facebook has a feature which they call “Pages” where you can set up a page about your business, product, service, place, store, restaurant, bar or club, organization, politician, non-profit, TV show, film, game, sports team, celebrity or public figure, music, or website.

Each of the categories comes with default features, to give information about your business, organization, etc. For example, I just set up a page for my Internet marketing company, and some of the available features were to list out my web sites, give a company overview, our mission, products, photos, videos, events, and notes, which you can set to automatically pull in your most recent blog post.

If you are a band and want to set up a Facebook page, it will allow you to upload your songs so people can play them right there on the page.

Once you have a page set up and published, you can then announce that to all your friends on Facebook, and ask them to go see the page and sign up as “fans.” Once someone is a fan, you can easily send out communications to the whole fan list any time you want.

It’s good to also update your Facebook Page with new stuff on a regular basis. For example, if you have a blog set it up so it automatically pulls in your blog posts. Or as you add new articles to other social media sites such as Squidoo or HubPages, add the URLs under the web sites section.

Friends

Facebook is set up much like MySpace in that you can contact people you know that are on the network, and ask them to be your “friends.” Once someone is your friend, you can see all the information on their profile (many people set their accounts up so you can’t see their profile without being their friend). And you can share a link, add photos, add a video, and write a note, and a message will go out to all your friends.

Of course you don’t want to be hyping your products or services all the time via the link, photo, video or note service, because people will get mad at you and either block your communications or remove you as a friend. I have seen some people who became my friends on Facebook do this and I removed them, as it got really annoying. But you can occasionally promote your product or service this way and it’s fine to do. You just can’t do it every day or bad stuff will happen. You can even get reported to Facebook. Not sure what they will do but it’s probably not good.

One note on your strategy on adding friends. You will need to decide how you will decide on who you will accept as friends and who you will ask to be your friend. Fairly early on I got connected with some of my friends on Facebook, and then looked in their friends list for people I knew. I then asked them to be my friend. This is a great way to find people you know on Facebook. After a while I started using Facebook’s friend finder utility, and finding people who had 20 or more friends in common with me, and asking to be their friend. I decided that if anyone proposed to me to be a friend, I’d accept them if there were at least some friends in common. That’s the way I decided to do it, which has resulted in a little over 300 friends so far. You can decide on your own strategy.

I have recently gotten several reaches for business through Facebook using these methods.