Studying and mastering some Facebook marketing secrets will doubtless enhance the traffic building capability of any online marketer nowadays. With hundreds of millions of users, truly Facebook cannot be ignored by anyone who is serious about driving traffic towards their business websites and making more sales. In fact, if you’ve been using pay-per-click and search engine marketing for the past few years, now is the time to look at the potential of Facebook marketing and add it to your overall advertising strategy. In the next few paragraphs, let’s look at some free and paid methods of advertising in the world’s currently most popular social media site.

If you are offering a product or service brand, one of the most common free ways of promoting on Facebook is creating so-called “fan pages”. These are Facebook pages that you can create and customize so that you can place relevant information about your business, inform your market about updates, and basically brand yourself in the social media platform. The beauty of Facebook pages is that they are searchable within the Facebook community, and other users can easily find your created page if It matches the likes and interests reflected on their profiles.

Doing the old-fashioned way of prospecting and networking will also work on this social media site, if your intentions are clean and if you provide value to the community. Befriending people who are in your market is a good long term strategy for networking and prospecting. For example, if you are selling weight loss information, it is always a great idea to find friends on Facebook who need to lose weight, or has needs and wants that match the benefits that your product can offer. Be careful though, because randomly adding people can get you banned on Facebook. It is always better to get real on social media communities. Start by adding your real-life friends, and then branch out from there by participating in groups and discussion forums.

Free methods are great, but if you are truly serious about promoting your online business, a better alternative is to use the paid Facebook ads feature. This is more like a pay-per-click advertising platform where you can create short ad snippets and then pay for each click that your ad gets. But what separates the Facebook ads from all other PPC platforms is that it is not entirely keyword based. Instead of relying only on keyword search phrases, you can target your audience using advanced demographics such as likes, interests, date of birth, location, age, nationality and many others.
This allows you to create ads that are extremely targeted to your ideal customers.

But the secret to advertising on Facebook (and any other ad platform) is old-fashioned honesty. For example, if you are selling candles, don’t be afraid to admit that you are! More often, people who click on ads are extremely interested buyers and the mere fact that they visited your site means they are looking for ways to buy a product that they want and need. Don’t waste your time beating around the bush. State the exact product or service that you will render, the benefits and advantages that they will get, and what they need to do to get what you are offering.