Facebook is a fantastic tool for communicating with your larger network and for staying in touch with friends, colleagues and classmates that you would otherwise have possibly lost touch with. While it is generally meant to be a social utility, the marketing applications are impossible to miss and of course this is something that every smart business is currently taking advantage of.
But if you’re an individual you can use Facebook as a marketing tool as well. Whether you want to gain support for a personal project, help promote an entrepreneurial pursuit, or even raise awareness for a cause that’s close to you – Facebook can provide you with the means to do so.
How to Promote on Facebook
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So if you’re an individual trying to promote to your friends and family, what do you do?
The most obvious strategy of course is simply to post your links to the home feed. Post a link or a story in your status and this will come up on the homefeeds of anyone who has you as a friend. If you think of a way to make this as eye-catching and as interesting as possible (with controversial or shocking titles and images that are likely to turn heads), then you will find that lots of your friends and family click those links and read the information in more detail. Even when they don’t follow the links though, you’ll find that they get seen and this alone will be enough to increase awareness to some degree.
How to Avoid Saturation
Posting too many links to the homefeed is a mistake however. Eventually this will lead to saturation as your connections get tired of seeing links on the same topics come up time and again. This can actually end up damaging your cause and can even lead you to lose friends from your network.
So what’s the solution?
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Well one answer is to make sure that you vary the ways you try to drum up support. Posting a link to a charity every week will get annoying quickly for your connections, so instead you need to look for other ways to mention the cause. Post a link one day for instance, then perhaps write a note – this is less intrusive but many people will be curious to see what you’ve written. Likewise another option is to get into a conversation with an individual or a group regarding your charity. Message someone you haven’t spoken to for a while and ask them if they’d consider supporting your charity/liking your page. This might seem a little rude, but actually the fact that it’s more personal means that it won’t feel so much like ‘spamming’. If you are keen to use Facebook to promote your message on a daily basis, then there are lots of ways you can do it other than constantly posting the same message…
Creating a Group and Page
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Another important step is to create a group. This way you can get people who are interested to sign up, and can then spread your message to those people regularly without upsetting them. These people have given you their consent to promote to them, so they won’t get annoyed if things keep showing up on their feed.
Likewise you can also make more money by creating a Facebook page, which has the benefit of allowing you to promote to people outside of your immediate network. Ask your closest friends to join and then to invite their contacts to, and you’ll find that you can quickly start to rack up a large number of likes.
Another important tip is to make sure that you use a little humour when promoting your cause or your product. Constantly pestering people to click a link, to like a page or to send you money is of course an easy way to lose Facebook friends, but including a little humour is a great way to gain a lot of goodwill that can buy you the benefit of the doubt.
If you want people to join a group or like a page then why not make it something funny that they will actually want to share? From there you can then spread your message to the people who are already members of your group and find you’re a lot more successful than trying to guilt them into joining then ramming the message in their faces.
This article is authored by Allen Peters, an employee at Fundraising for a Cause, providers of wholesale fundraising merchandise like autism ribbons. Allen loves to play the guitar in his spare time and is a huge Bryan Adams fan.
