Facebook is the
world’s most popular social networking site that has managed to conquer almost
every demographic. Whether your target
audience is teens, geeks, business-men, or pensioners, you can be confident
that they have a presence on Facebook.
This makes the site a great choice for your next affiliate marketing
campaign.
Conquering
Facebook can be tricky, however. Most
people don’t go to Facebook to find out what they should be spending their
money on next, they go to Facebook to talk to their friends. If you want to catch people’s attention,
you’ll need to get creative.
There’s More to Marketing than Just
Ads
You’ve
probably noticed that most affiliate forum threads tend to centre around
visibility and conversions. The best
marketers don’t just throw up ads and hope for the best, they look at creating
buzz around their products and getting people to share links, reviews, and
comments. If you want to succeed, that’s
what you need to do.
Facebook’s ad service is useful as a starting point – it lets you write your ad and tell
Facebook exactly what type of person you want to reach (area, demographics, etc.)
With
Facebook’s ad service, you can say that you want your ad to appear on the pages
of USA based males under the age of 30, or German women under the age of 45.
You can even limit the targeting by interest, marital status, political views,
and education background. This means
that you won’t waste impressions showing dating sites to married men, or “buy
your Ph.D online” ads to people who already have a Ph.D.
However,
Facebook ads still look like ads; they appear in areas of the screen that are
easily ignored, and they don’t get anywhere near the number of clicks that a
regular status update would get.
You can increase
the chances of people clicking on your ads by allowing Facebook to “improve”
the ads by linking them to relevant groups.
This will ensure that people see a good reason to be interested in the
ads, which is always positive for conversions.
Building a Page People Talk About
To get your
message appearing in the main feed, where people are going to click, read,
share, and comment, you need to build a page that people engage with. This means having an eye-catching banner
image, posting lots of interesting content, and using images in your posts.
Remember the
first thing you learned about advertising when you joined an affiliate forum -
each post you make should have a call to action in it – even if that call to
action is simply “like this” or “leave a comment with your favourite
joke”. Each interaction matters, and
will make your content that little bit more visible.
Don’t make
every post you make to your page be one with an affiliate link. If you want to post advertisements all the
time, then buy ads! Pages are for
building up a relationship with your fans, and for establishing yourself as an
expert in whatever niche your product is in. You can post ads, but do so
sparingly. Once people are used to you
posting quality content, they’ll be more likely to click your links.
Facebook is
about personal interactions, so don’t spam.
Talk to people, and they’ll come to trust you.
Image source: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33488/14-Funny-Brands-You-Can-t-Help-But-Follow-in-Social-Media.aspx
