Facebook with it's about 1 Billion - Yes - 1,000,000,000 users is THE Social Network and is growing into the most powerful and efficiant marketing channel in the world. As a business we need to use this to our advantage in the best possible way through Facebook Pages, Facebook Advertising and Social Network Communication. So how can we do this even better? The Answer: by combining the two most powerful ways of communication today - Facebook and SMS/ Mobile services!


Let me tell you Why, How, Where, What and How Mutch!
Actually the why should be obvious, but I'll go through all the point one by one to make my point :-)

Well, this is what I say is the obvious part of it, but let me be more spesific.
Using SMS/Mobile Solutions together with Facebook gives you a unique way of communicating with your clients. You can engade your fans and clients in new ways, and you can get your information directly to your fans and clients in an incredible more efficiant way. As an example an e-mail to a e-mail list is read of about 10 - 15% of the recepients if you are lucky, a Facebook message is read of maybe 40 - 50% of your fans while a SMS is read by 95-99% of the recipients! So just imagine what the combination gives you!!

How?
The how is also easy enough, but not as easy as the Why. To integrate a SMS service on your Facebook Page you will need a SMS Gateway and you will need to create a Tab on you Facebook Page where your solution for SMS is integrated. This can be a bit technical, but help is near :-)

Where?
There are many SMS gateway services out there and there is even more Facebook Tab solutions avilable. But, there is not so many services that combines the two. We at Netxolutions however is one of the few that offers such a service, and we even tailor make every solution acording to every clients needs and demands. So sooner rather than later visit our Facebook Page and see for yourself how you can integrate SMS with Facebook.

What?
So, now you know Why, How and Where - now we need to think about What we can do with SMS on Facebook, and this is where only your imagination sets the limit. Let me give you just a few ideas.

Special Offers
Let your fans enter their number into a form like the one you can test on our Facebook Page and send them a special offer back as soon as they hit "submit".

Coupons
Instead of a special offer, you could send your fans QR-codes that gives them a special price when scanning it in your shop. Or you can simply send them a Coupon Code they can use next time they visit your web-shop, store or business.

Mobile Landing Pages
Use mobile landingpages to include even more information in your SMS. This could be only information, a special offer or a fully functional Web-shop. There are close to no limits.

SMS-list
Establish a SMS-list instead of or in addition to your e-mail list. Send your members offers, news and specials on a regular basis and see how your business grows.

Apps
SMS is a very efficiant way to spread your iPhone or Android Apps. Simply add a link to iTunes or Android Market in your SMS and your fans can download directly to their phone.

How Mutch?
Almost nothing in this world is free, but sometimes it is very close :-)
A SMS solution from Netxolutions is affordable as well as flexible. To find out how mutch this will cost for your business, take a few minutes to write down your needs and then visit our SMS Tab on our Facebook Page and send us your information, needs and demands and we will give you a special offer on SMS Integration.

Using Social Media for marketing is efficient and sholud give you a very high ROI compared to other marketing methods both online and offline. In this article I will look at the importance of a good Social Media Plan and how I think you should plan and work with your online marketing.

Overview and the "big" lines.
When working with your Social Media Plan the first thing you need to do is to get an overview of what you want to do, what your goals are and so on. I call this the "big" lines. For example if you are just starting on with a new Facebook Page for your business the "big" line would be something like this:

• Geographical area
• Age and sex
• Education level
• Interests

This is just a few examples, where the top two is the most important ones.

Next we need to figure out how we should target these potential fans and how we turn the into fans. There are several ways to do this - let's take a quick look at a few of them.

Facebook Advertising
If you are looking for Likes/Fans this is the best way to get them. Sure you can get thousands and thousands of likes from all over the world through "guaranteed likes" services for a very low price, but this is not really tha fans you want. Using Facebook Advertising however you can target your ads towards exactly the people you want as your fans. To get the most out of your advertising you should use a service like Netxolutions to manage your campaign for you - chanses are you will get more out of your budget using a professional that you would get doing it all by yourself.

Sweepstakes and other competitions
Use sweepstakes, quizes, video competitions, photo competitions and any other kind of insentive to get fans/likes. There are many ways to do this, and you can take a look at some examples on our Facebook Page. (Video Competition - Essay Competition - Sweepstakes )

Other online marekting
Getting fans and likes is obviously best done through Facebook Ads, but never forget about Google, Bing, Yahoo and other sites. You should consider at least also a Google PPC campaign. As with Facebook Ads you can and should use a professional.

Offline marekting
Even thoug you should use more and more of your marketing budget doing online marketing you should not forget about your offline marketing. Offline marketing is not only newspaper ads, radio spots and tv. Also remember you flyers, business cards, invoices, posters, signs, stickers, roll-ups, folders, clothing etc. All of these shoul include your Facebook URI. Also remember that you can do many exciting things with QR-codes and mobile platforms.

In this articlet I will talk about how to make efficient use of Facebook in online marketing. To really understand how this work, let us first take a look at a two things people believe work, but really don’t.

As many followers/fans/likes as possible
The numbers of likes has nothing to do with success on Facebook. Anyone can give your page thousands of fans, but if you are not a international brand like Coca Cola, Pepsi or Mc Donals there is absolutely no reason to have this as your goal.

Product and brand focus.
Surprisingly for many this is not efficient marketing on Facebook. People really don’t care about you or your products anymore – they care only about themselves. We will look closer at this later.

So to the stuff that actually work, and why.

Important to remember
There is a few things that are important to remember and understand about Facebook. One is the Edge Score and another is the way we as persons use Facebook.

Edge Score is a measuring unit that Facebook uses to measure how “important” your status updates are for your followers. If you look at your own “homepage” at Facebook you will see that there is not all of your friends updates or updates from pages you follow you can see without clicking the “Latest news” button on the top. This is because some has a higher Edge Score than the other. This changes all the time, and you may have thought about it sometime – “why does this person updates show today and not a few days ago?” Well that’s Edge Score.

How we use Facebook is another very important thing we need to think about when working with marketing online. Think about yourself and your own homepage on Facebook, here you will find small day-to.day updates from your friends and family about everyday stuff like walking the dog, what to eat for dinner, out running etc. This is what most people see, and more importantly want to see. So when we as marketers write on Facebook we need to remember that our message will be visible in-between all of these everyday updates. So du we then want to tell them about our fantastic ABS Breaking system? – sure some people is interested, but far from all. And honestly is it the one who care about the technical part of ABS breaking systems we want to connect with or is it the 200 other car-owners we want? Think about it…

Forget about products and brand
Many business owners have a hard time to think this way, but the social media world is here and we need to think differently. Today people have choices and this is “killing” traditional marketing. Think about it, today we change channel on the TV to avoid commercials, we read newspaper online instead of on paper, we look at short videos on YouTube etc, etc.

Today people simply care mostly about themselves and what their need is. And not only that – they care about what their need is “right now” - not tomorrow or next year but right now, right here.
So how can we achieve this?

Strategy or not?
Sure we should have a strategy for Facebook, but don’t make it to rigid. Have a overall plan, and a strategy that makes it possible to change with your clients and prospects.

An example of a strategy
To really show what I am saying about all this, let me show it with a small example.

1. Getting the first followers
Of course we need followers, but we need the right ones. So let us use a local car dealership as an example. A car dealership don’t need international followers or national followers, they need local followers. They do not need followers below 18 (16) .
So, how do we attract the first local followers? First of all we need to make them a reason to join your page. Let me use a extreme example done by Reanult Norway. They made a sweepstake on their Facebook Page where the winner got a brand new Renault Megane. Through a Facebook advertising campaign they targeted facebook users within their target group and gor thousands of fans in no time. Sure you might say – and yes sure, but what happens next is the interesting part.

2. Keeping your fans and interacting with them.
What Renault Norway did is that they after the initial campaign started to communicate with their followers. But as I have talked about earlier, not about their product and brand. For example they posted a question on their Facebook wall – “what is your best car-vacation memory?” The response was huge, and people posted their memories, and interestingly most people either posted “when I was on a vacation in my car xxxx” or “When we was on a vacation in our Renaul Megane xxx” – you see what is happening?

Renault Norway also posted questions like: “If you were to test-drive a Renault today, which model would you try?” – as you can see product mentioning can be used as well of course, but in a kind of “non selling” way.
The result by the way is that Renault Norway has a big and dedicated fanbase on Facebook. Their fans ask questions and post comments.

It is extremely important to answer you fans quickly. Use tools or external help to do this!!!

Timing!
As business owners we know that timing is important, so also with online marketing and especially when it comes to Facebook and other social medias.

There is lots and lots of statistics on the topic, but in my experience there is a few times that works better than other.

If your average client is a family father or mother with fulltime job and kids, you do not want to post updates in the morning (they will be stressed out with kids anyway), just before lunch can be a ok time, but you will be “interrupting” their job. Maybe 4pm – 6pm? – No, they will be having dinner, driving kids around etc. So when?

The answer – 10pm – 11pm is Facebook Primetime for this target group. The kids are in bed, and for the first time this day they have time to think about “me here – me now – my needs” (as we talked about earlier)
Sunday afternoon and nights are also good.

What is important is to do split tests on your Facebook ad-campaigns. What works when etc.

Cost!
There is one mistake more businesses make than any other – they don’t want to use money on Facebook Marketing. There are some many businesses that are willing to use tens of thousands of dollars every month on advertisements in newspapers, radio or TV, but only want to use a few hundred on Facebook. This is a BIG mistake. I’m not saying you should stop “offline” marketing, but do a mix and use a larger portion of your marketing budget online. If you use 1,000 dollar on a newspaper ad, you should use the same on Facebook advertising. And always, always, always remember to mention your Facebook page on all other advertising.

If you don’t have the time to do all the work on Facebook yourself, you can outsource the work to professional social media managers like us. A professional Social Media Manager is not as expensive as you may think.

To get a company like ours to manage a Facebook Ad campaign you will pay about 10% of the advertisement cost and maybe a setup fee or a monthly management fee. In most cases you will actually in the end pay less for your advertising using a professional than you would doing it yourself, even with the 10% extra. The reason being that a professional knows more about the secrets of getting lower click price than you do.

Having someone to manage your day-to-day Facebook activity can cost you anything from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars monthly depending on the amount of work. Most likely a professional Social Media Manager can with the tools available to them manage your Facebook page in about 1 hour per day. (7 days a week). So with a budget of 25 – 30 hours monthly you will have a professional Social Media Manager providing you with a professionally managed Facebook Page. Aprox 500 - 1000 dollars a month. If you compare that to “offline” advertisement it is very affordable.

Remember, you must put some money and time in to this in the beginning. If you use a Social Media Manager use some time together with him/her and set p some overall strategies and plan. Make a plan for the initial campaign, and make a budget for the next 6 – 12 months.

A few closing remarks
This is a very short and simplified article giving some tips and insides to efficient Facebook Marketing.
To summarize the main aspects:

• Have a plan and a strategy but not too rigid
• Don’t focus on products and brands
• It’s not the numbers of fans that counts, but the quality
• Be interactive – ALWAYS answer your fans.
• Be a resource for your fans
• Use professional help if you need to
• Facebook is marketing – don’t think of it as somewhere it is “free” to be.
• Remember that your status updates will be visible to your fans in between messages from their friends and family.