Business Buzz: Facebook – unlimited sales potential at our fingertips

PHUKET: Marketing 101: to make money you need customers, and to get customers you need a database to market to. The better quality the database, the better the results. But we will come back to that in a minute…

These days everyone has heard of Facebook. Most people who are even mildly computer literate have a Facebook profile, no matter what their age or background.

From simple beginnings and a mere 100 million followers in 2008 to more than 1.3 billion in 2014, Facebook has exploded.

So what does that mean for the average businessman or person looking to profit from the Internet? Well, put simply it is a goldmine which many people do not fully understand.

So now back to our database…

Imagine a place where you could find over a billion customers, and you can target them by almost any characteristic you want. That is exactly what Facebook provides us. Additionally, Google now recognises your Facebook profile or Page as a stand-alone website (I don’t have space to explain why here, but this is very important and if used properly is a huge benefit for search engine optimization (SEO)).

Facebook breaks down its users for us by age, sex, marital status, geographic location, likes, interests, hobbies, people and groups we are friends with, our viewing history and much more. It even tell us who has spent money online recently, so we know who the spenders are. In reality it is like having a highly targeted marketing database but without having to take the time, effort or cost to build it ourselves.

In fact, we can “rent it” as we want (or any targeted segment of it we like), and just pay for those that are interested in what we have to offer. Just think about that for a minute, and how powerful that really is. For potentially as little as a few cents per person we can get our targeted message right in front of our perfect customer – and any smart business should know their target market.

Just remember, the rules and procedures change often so it is important to keep up to date. Many of these changes were to make us use Facebook advertising so it could make money.

Recent changes that have impacted sales and promotion include stopping the ability to send mass emails to fans and followers, and more recently only 8% of your contacts will ever be shown your posts and status updates unless you pay to promote them. This means you have now lost a random 90 per cent or more of your database without many people even realizing it.

Here are the most important points to remember when posting on Facebook: be engaging and consistent; add value; create content that is popular and current; always be honest, ethical and truthful (do the would you share it with your grandmother test?); ask people to like and share; and if paying for advertising, start with a small budget while you learn (great for instant results).

It is such a large subject I could write for days, so I hope this brief introduction proves helpful.

These days everyone is so busy and we all want more leisure time. What if you could get someone to do what you could not be bothered to do or do not have the technical skills or know how for only 150 Baht? Next time we will share that with you…

Simon Wetherell is a Social Media expert, Best Selling Author & International Speaker. He now resides in Phuket where he trains businesses and individuals on how to profit from the use of Social Media. For more information go to https://PhuketOnlineMarketing.com or call him on 095 085 3355. Follow him on Social Media – Twitter @SimonWetherell or @PhuketMarketing Facebook: SAWetherell or PhuketOnlineMarketing LinkedIn th.linkedin.com/in/simonwetherell/en