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The Six Biggest Facebook Marketing Mistakes You're Making

Facebook can be a powerful way to target potential and current customers, track the ROI of your campaigns down to the penny, and grow your business' influence. But, sadly, I keep seeing companies make the same few mistakes over and over again when it comes to their Facebook marketing. Here are the most common and how to avoid them.
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Facebook can be a powerful way to target potential and current customers, track the ROI of your campaigns down to the penny, and grow your business' influence. But, sadly, I keep seeing companies make the same few mistakes over and over again when it comes to their Facebook marketing. Here are the most common and how to avoid them.

1. Using a Personal Page for Your Company

Facebook wants personal profiles to be strictly for people, not companies. If you log into a profile and it has your company's name on it (in other words, you have to approve "friends" for your business), you're doing it wrong and Facebook does shut down profiles it finds doing this. There are lots of disadvantages to using a personal profile for your brand:

  • You don't get access to any advertising tools.
  • You will need to approve "friends" one-by-one (and you'll max out at 5,000).
  • You'll have to always be logging in and out, back and forth, between your accounts.

Instead, you shouldcreate a brand pageand use that for your business. It's free and easy to do.

2. Using Facebook's Default "Boost Post" Advertising Product

Facebook really wants you to "boost" your posts -- this means giving Facebook a bit of money to get your post on more news feeds. The problem with boosting a post is that you'll be spending your money to reach people who Like your page and all their friends! And while Facebook has introduced some targeting options (age, gender, geography), these aren't great targeting parameters. Instead, use Facebook's Ad Manager and promote the post there. You'll be able to target just your fans (people who Like your page) and/or others by their interests. For instance, if you own a restaurant, wouldn't you rather your ad dollars going to reach people who are already interested in dining out than just the general public?

3. Not Tracking Your Conversions

When you buy advertising on Facebook, you can tell it what your conversion event is (a conversion is the successful consumer action you want -- the objective of the ad). For instance, it might be a purchase right on your web site, or somebody signing up to your e-newsletter. Facebook lets you track these conversions and report how many people did what you wanted them to do. With a little bit of code hacking, you can even tell Facebook what each conversion is worth to you and it'll calculate the return-on-investment for you.

4. Buying Fans

There are a multitude of fly-by-night services that will sell you fans by the thousands -- and cheap. For even just $10, you can get hundreds of people to Like your page. Here's the problem: Most of these are click-farms in developing nations, so the vast majority of Likes you'll get are from people in Bangladesh, India, Romania, and so on. (Which is fine if you market to those areas, but you probably don't.) Then, when you go to pay Facebook to advertise to your fans, you'll be wasting your money on these people who are very unlikely to convert. Instead, set up a campaign targeting people in your market and with interests similar to your business in Facebook's ad manager to grow your likes.

5. Posting Poor-Quality Content

If you're going to have a brand page, you'll need to keep it active with content. Think about the kind of content that would be useful to people who Like your page. Don't just fill it with promotional posts or people will quickly Unlike you. Remember to ask people to engage with your content by encouraging sharing and commenting -- when someone interacts with your posts, this increases the likelihood that your content will show up on their News Feed in the future. If you're starting out, post at different times each day, different frequencies (number of posts per day), and different types of posts (status update, link, image, video, etc.). Then, after a month or so, use a tool like Edgerank Checker to determine what your fans are responding to best.

6. Leaving Your Page's About Info Incomplete

Your Facebook page is highly indexible by Google, but only if you put information there. Be sure to fill in as many fields as you can in the "About" section of your page. If the fields offered don't seem relevant to your business, change the type of business page you have.

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