Chapter 4: An Initial Facebook Overview
Introduction
If you are used to opening up the home page of MySpace, then you will in all probability find the first page of Facebook somewhat plain, perhaps even a little bland.
However, you can clearly see from the screenshot above that the first thing the site encourages you to do is to 'Find Friends’ (the emphasis being on ‘finding’ people you already know).
Should you choose to follow this link, you will quickly discover that it takes you to a screen that allows you to search for ex-pupils of your old high school or university.
It is not, therefore, encouraging you to go out seeking lots of new friends in the same way that MySpace does.
Of course, the site does try to encourage you to meet new people who have interests similar to yours, especially by clicking on the 'Groups' icon in the top left-hand side bar of the screen shown. This will take you to this screen:
from where it is possible to 'Browse groups’ as indicated.
Now, if your objective with Facebook is to promote a product or service, then you might want to feature links to your website in as many ways as possible, on the assumption that doing so might potentially drive visitors from Facebook back to your website or blog.
This, however, is not particularly easy, nor is it likely to be especially effective either.
Individual profile pages are really not built in such a way that your links can be featured in any way that is likely to generate site visitors for you. There is no way that you can show these links particularly prominently, and thus even if you were to include a link to your website, it is extremely unlikely that it would generate any appreciable numbers of visitors.
One way that you could try to advertise your business is by creating a new group, as this can feature an appropriate link back to your site.
For example, clicking through on this link for single people in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia:
would bring you 11to this screen, where clicking on the highlighted link would then take you to one of the premier commercial online dating sites in South East Asia.
So, if, for example, you were selling dog related products or promoting an affiliate program that was concerned with dog training or natural dog food, for example, then you might be able to attract some visitors to your site if you were able to start a brand new group whose common interest was dogs.
Being realistic, however, this is unlikely to drive significant numbers of new visitors to your website either. So, in truth, it is probably only worth considering if you genuinely have an interest in starting your own Facebook group for reasons other than advertising or promoting an external website
In other words, it is likely to be a bit of a waste of the time to start a group purely with the intention of using it to create traffic for your website or affiliate program.
Of course, all social networking websites want you to spend as much time as possible creating an attractive profile for your site, but, in the case of Facebook, your profile does not allow you quite so much flexibility as your MySpace ‘space’ gives you.
It is, therefore going to be considerably more difficult to convince people to visit your web site from your own personal profile with this particular website.
Using Classified Advertising
You may have noted from the top left-hand side bar of the homepage that there is a section of the Facebook site that is called 'Marketplace'. This is the Classified Advertising section of the Facebook site.
Now, over the past couple of years, many online business people and internet marketers have enjoyed significant levels of success with various classified advertising sites (such as Craigslist, and USFreeads) by choosing the most highly trafficked sites from the many hundreds of similar sites available.
Indeed, on the back of these successes, there have been many products that teach people how to successfully promote their products and services using only free classified advertising, so there certainly seems to be at least some potential to generate business and associated revenues from classified ads.
Here is a snapshot of the categories of Classified Ads available in the Facebook ‘Market Place’:
So, it would simply be a question of creating your short classified ad and sending readers from there to your website or blog where you would be promoting your products or services.
Now, of course it would be logical to place your advertising in the place where it is most likely to be seen, which in the example shown above would clearly be the 'For Sale' section of the marketplace.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that this is the ‘For Sales’ section, you should not directly attempt to sell your product or service in your advert as this is extremely unlikely to be successful.
Do not forget that the primary objective of placing this advertising is to drive people to your website or blog where you will be able to do a 'proper' sales job.
To take an example, therefore, imagine that you are promoting a dog related affiliate program. You would not try to promote this program directly from your classified ad.
What you would do, however, is send people from your classified advertising to your website by offering them a free dog related gift that they can only collect by visiting your site.
If, for example, you have a free dog training e-book or special report, then this would be an ideal free gift to offer to anybody who visits your site.
Do not forget that the primary objective of anybody who is trying to construct a successful business online should always be to seek whatever opportunities are available for them to build their mailing list.
Indeed, most online business experts and commentators would agree that your mailing list is your business, and that is should always be your number one priority to focus on this business building requirement.
Thus, if you are driving visitors to your dog training site so that they can collect your free e-book or reports, do not give away the report without collecting their e-mail address and name in return.
In this way, even if your site visitor chooses not to buy your dog training product, you would at least have collected another name for your mailing list, and that is someone that will potentially become a customer at some point in the future.
top: 0.0pt; margin: 0pt 46.8pt 0pt 1.35pt;">The classified advertising that I have myself placed in the Facebook marketplace has been entirely free of charge, and you should therefore use this resource as much as possible.
You should, of course, check that advertising placed in the Facebook marketplace in your own locality is also free, as Facebook is a site that is often tailored to meet the needs of local markets.
If so, then you should try to create as many different classified ad units as you can. Enhance the effectiveness of your ads by including attractive pictures wherever possible in order to make your ads stand out from the crowd.
Finally, you will note that such classified advertising can either be limited to your specific geographical location, or be published on a worldwide basis.
Of course, if you are selling a tangible, physical product that requires delivery, then it would probably make sense to limit the distribution of your ad. If, however, your product is digitally delivered, then there is no logical reason to limit the scope and therefore the reach and effectiveness of your classified advertising.
Similarly, you can include the advertising in your profile as well, and this again would make sense as it gives you another possible
opportunity to draw people who view your profile to your web site link. In this way, you can make the most of the free classified advertising opportunities presented by the Facebook marketplace.
Of course, classified advertising within the Facebook community suffers exactly the same basic fault that all such promotional efforts do, which is that you will have little or no idea who actually views your adverts.
Indeed, to take it to its most extreme example, you will have no idea whether anyone at all has actually seen your ads in the Facebook marketplace. It is as a way of addressing this problem, as well as many others that are associated with 'traditional' advertising methods, that Facebook have recently significantly overhauled the advertising options that they offer.
Let’s look at some of these new advertising options and features that are now a part of the Facebook community site, and then consider how you can most effectively use them to generate maximum returns for your business.