10 Things All Businesses Should Do to Market More Effectively on Facebook

January 27, 2009

Now that there are over 150 million active users on Facebook, more businesses large and small are actively reaching and engaging customers through Facebook and the Facebook Platform.

Global chains all the way down to the local pub are building social marketing strategies that leverage the strengths of Facebook to drive traffic to their pages and feet to their premises.

However, many business owners are daunted by Facebook’s sheer scale, and simply don’t know where to start. Inside Facebook is here to help guide business owners and marketers through that process.

Here are Inside Facebook’s top 10 ways business owners can more effectively leverage Facebook to reach their target audience and drive more business. To dive deeper on the ways you can leverage Facebook for your marketing goals - including each of the tactics listed below - check out the
Facebook Marketing Bible: The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook.

Check out The Facebook Marketing Bible: 40+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook

Article from: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/01/27/10-things-all-businesses-should-do-to-market-more-effectively-on-facebook/

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009

Written by Ravit Lichtenberg / January 27, 2009 10:00 AM

"Social media" was the term du jour in 2008. Consumers, companies, and marketers were all talking about it. We have social media gurus, social media startups, social media books, and social media firms.

It is now common practice among corporations to hire social media strategists, assign community managers, and launch social media campaigns, all designed to tap into the power of social media.

But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.

Facebook, a once groundbreaking online community, has become the ant colony of third-party applications. Twitter users now have a dozen or so additional applications they can use to overcome Twitter's ever-present shortcomings. People spread themselves across a number of tools and maintain different networks on each (large portions of which they don't even know), making it nearly impossible to decide what to share and with whom.

Users, marketers, and companies face an incredible amount of noise, too. For every new application that relies on a network, another crops up that helps users manage it. While "eyeballs" used to be the coveted metric, both ad publishers and investors now realize that having smaller well-targeted niches can lead to much better returns than marketing to one large undifferentiated mass of users.

Meaning and connection -- two key anchors of all things social media -- are corroding by the day as people's ability to organize their experiences and find the relevance of their networks declines. Social media, in essence, is bumping up against its own ceiling, no longer able to serve the needs of those living within its walls; and for these reasons, social media as we know it is changing course.

Social Media is Evolving ... continue reading here