Approximately 80% of the 100 biggest advertisers in the U.S.A use Facebook for marketing.

Facebook is now one of the most powerful marketing tools online.

Facebook is now the world’s largest social marketing and advertising platform, far exceeding Google and Twitter.

840 million users, with over 50% logging in everyday!

So where do you start to get on the social media revolution? Well firstly you need to have a fan page on Facebook (if you do not have one already). This is pretty simple to do and should only take a few minutes.

Keep life simple, all you want is a Fan page for either yourself, your company, a particular product, brand or service. Forget about groups, connect, photo tagging, profiles or applications. Lets just keep it simple and build a intereaction page for your fans or customers.

Next do a bit of research. Spend a few hours on Facebook looking at the pages of the big boys. Coca Cola, Starbucks, Red Bull, Nike etc. See the way they have developed their fan pages using high resolution graphics, showing new products, exclusive discount coupons for their Facebook fans, and incentives to entice new fans and potential new customers. Its all about being interactive.

Ok, so we have your Facebook page set up. you have described your product, brand etc in the description boxes. To do this click on the top right of your page the “Edit Page” box, you will then see “Basic Information”

Its always good to upload good quality photos of your products or business. Do not forget you to upload your company/brand logo, this will be seen all the time by Facebook users.

The success of your fan page is based largely on the ability to communicate with your fans. To do this you need to post on your Wall (“What’s on your mind”).

This can be done by sending them an offer, making a statement or asking your fans questions to gain feedback. Alternatively you can upload photo’s, videos or add a link to your website.

So now the fan page is ready to rock n roll, but it cannot do that without fans. Therefore the next objective is to win or gain new fans. These fans do not come to you by themselves. You really need to find or generate at least 25 fans to move on to the next step – securing your vanity url. Ask friends, relatives and employees to like your fanpage. you need to get a minimum of 25 likes, then you can apply to Facebook for a vanity url.

A vanity URL is a Facebook customized web address. If you look at your existing Facebook url address it will be something like this: facebook.com/pages/yourbusiness/1234567. You can just keep this url but it is better to customise the url either with your company name, brand or keyword. It will look like this – facebook.com/yourbusiness.

Choosing a vanity url is optional but adds that extra level of professionalism to your business page and gives you a shorter, more memorable web address for your business page.

If your name is not available as a vanity url, it might be worth trying a target keyword for your products. This happened to our client www.duty-freee.com. They wanted the vanity url to be /dutyfree however this is extremely popular and was not available, so one of their main keywords was tried and approved /cigarettesonline

http://www.facebook.com/cigarettesonline

Ok, you have your vanity url, you have uploaded your company logo, photo’s, videos and company description text on what the company is about and what it offers. The most important tool you need to add on your website is the Fan Like box, there are many varients of this at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/

The Fan Like box can be built into your main web page, a side bar or even to the left or right of the webpage and can even have the Fan box to float as fans scroll up and down the page.

Images from http://www.duty-freee.com

The above Fan page is to the right of the website and scrolls up and down.

On your Facebook fan page you do not need to add this Fan Like box, it is their by default, courtesy of Facebook.

You can now wait to grow your own fan base naturally through your own marketing and website traffic or you can use a social media marketing company to generate 1,000′s of fans in a very short period of time, usually a couple of weeks. These fans are 100% human and are targeted/niche to your Fan Page. Cost vary from an average $60 – $90 per 1,000 fans. Follow this link to Buy Facebook Fans

A social media marketing company can manage your marketing strategy by building campaigns using interactive graphics, sample product testing, coupon codes and monitoring the feedback and roi (return on investment). One of the better social media marketing companies is CGO Media.

Lastly take Facebook very seriously. Facebook is not a toy for teenagers. Over 800 million people use Facebook worldwide. Facebook dominates the social web. Facebook already generates more traffic to websites than Google. Invest therefore in attention, time and money. Social Media Marketing is not a passing trend, but the response to a rapid change in consumer behavior.