subject: Face-to-Face with your Facebook Customers [print this page] Face-to-Face with your Facebook Customers
One of the major challenges for a marketer is communicating effectively to customers and sending appropriate messages to possible clients. Various communication media are evolving since the early days of marketing. And since then, newsmakers and advertisers are utilizing media to reach their customers. However, most of the communication media are one way. But, the inception of internet and the developments within this type of media broke down the barriers of conventional media.
The Internet and Quantum Change in Media
The advent of internet brought a lot of changes in the science and practice of mass communication and in the marketing process itself. However, when internet first set waves of changes and everyone can share content in the World Wide Web, there was the time when the content sharing is under the control of people who are knowledgeable in various HTML codes and programming as well as web script languages. However, social networking sites and blogging sites emerge that give the power to common user to share content to the World Wide Web.
Facebook: No.1 Social Media
Facebook members and subscribers are rowing in numbers with over 500 million users. Facebook is considered as one of the strongest social media with its users engage to creating more and more content that they can share to the rest of the world. Millions of messages can be exchanged everyday and is embedded with customer-related information and messages.
Feedback Mechanism
During the time that TV and print ads, companies that are serious in developing their products employ strategies and investing a lot of money and effort in gathering information and soliciting feedback and opinions from their customers. This is to know what they have accomplished and if they have achieved their goal. Companies spend a lot of money in brand research and awareness level of brand competition.
In social networking sites such as Facebook, this information is readily available. All of the things that a company owner or marketer would like to know may be found in wall comments, fan pages, discussions and other platforms provided by Facebook. Moreover, most of the comments are immediate and honest responses.
Face-to-Face with Customers
Avid Facebook users create or form fan pages and groups based on their interests and often the conversations on fan pages revolves around the brand or topics pertaining to the product. Here are some useful tips for brand managers to keep a tab and build a brand in Facebook:
Do a brand search in Facebook You may need to conduct a research on terms related to your brand or research on your competition. Going through the discussions and wall comments will reveal some points of opinions that will give your product an edge.
Create a fan page If you know that your brand can attract fans and positive responses from people then you may create a fan page for your brand. A fan page can be a perfect platform that can engage you with your loyal customers and can create a strong bond with them.
Make your own branded application Facebook applications can range from entertaining games with your brand as useful tools in the application.
Facebook provides you with limitless opportunities in reaching out to your customers. The best thing is, this can be done at a very minimal cost and can deliver maximum impact and results. However, it is important to remember that you and your customer are at the same playing field with the same capability to express. Customers can now easily say positive and negative experiences with a particular product, which can easily influence other customers who may consider buying your product or availing your service.
Making sure that other customers will is very important in branding yourself and you may need the aid of experts in social media marketing as the dynamics of this media is quite different from the conventional forms of media. Hence, Facebook can help you come face-to-face with your customers. Thus, it is very important that you should know how this platform and conversations within can be managed.
