Are you utilizing Facebook?

I wrote this on another site and thought I'd share here.

I know you see all these articles about making money online and how other people did it and now all you want to do is make money online. It's not easy and takes hard work and tenacity to get where you want to be. Anyone who says you can replicate what they did with little to no work is either lying to you or expects you to pump a lot of money to make something work.

However, there are ways to make it easier and less costly. Such methods include social networking. In particular, I will discuss Facebook.

I've been big on Facebook since day 1 as it is a better platform to gain users and traffic than MySpace IMO. I don't even waste my time with MySpace anymore simply because the conversion rate is little to none.Facebook Pages are the way to go.

I Play COD facebook page existed before even thought about the forum. The number one reason forums fail is because there's no user base to keep it alive and thriving. Well Facebook pages allow you to get that pre-existing user base before pumping money into a domain, hosting and software.

I Play COD is only 2 weeks old and had approximately 3,150 fans at the time of this article. Some were free and some were paid. But the best thing about Facebook pages is you can advertise your facebook page and target specific demographics and profile interests to make sure you're getting fans that actually are interested in your subject.

With I Play COD, we are able to gain about 400 to 600 fans a day for just $10. That's $0.015 to $0.025 per fan and if you have advertised before, that kind of CPC rate for a targeted audience is beyond ideal. Even if you don't have money to spend on it, you can invite all your friends that you know are interested and every time someone becomes a fan of your page, it puts a link to your page in all their friends news feeds (waterfall effect).

This (FB advertising) allowed us to rack up a good amount of fan base on our Facebook page before even getting the website going. Throughout the day we post links to our site with interesting threads or news and it's an instant traffic rush to the site. When you post a link it shows up in all your fans news feed on their home page.

So to those that think creating a Facebook page is a waste of time, we have 2 other Facebook pages with over 6,000 fans and every time we post a link we are getting 50 to 100 uniques from posting that link. Don't spam your Facebook page though, you'll lose fans if you post an article every hour. Spread it out over the day... I would say max 4 posts a day but use your discretion based on your audience. You know them best!

Oh and you should definitely create a friendly url for your Facebook Page. You can do this by going to http://www.facebook.com/username

If you've had experience with Facebook Ads or Facebook Pages, would love to hear your input as well.

I've used facebook ads and although you can target the groups you want, I wasn't impressed.
I do like facebook pages, I have or manage a half dozen pages and have gotten a lot of use out of them
Feel free to add my Sheley Enterprises fan page.
I'll try to get a blog post up on how to effectively use facebook pages asap.

I ran an ad for a couple weeks. I kept increasing my ad spend and still wasn't getting any impressions. after $1 a click and still no clicks, i pulled it.

The waterfall effect with the way the new facebook setup is great. When friends join, it shows they became fans in others news feed and more often than not friends share the similar interest so when you pay $0.03 per fan you really are paying less than a $0.01 when you count the friends who join.

I updated the first post to include this:

Oh and you should definitely create a friendly url for your Facebook Page. You can do this by going to Set URL for Facebook Page

Originally Posted by iplay

The waterfall effect with the way the new facebook setup is great. When friends join, it shows they became fans in others news feed and more often than not friends share the similar interest so when you pay $0.03 per fan you really are paying less than a $0.01 when you count the friends who join.

where do you pay for fans?
and I agree, if you join a fan page it will show.. X joined X page and so did X number of your friends

Originally Posted by Brandon Sheley

where do you pay for fans?
and I agree, if you join a fan page it will show.. X joined X page and so did X number of your friends

When you go the Facebook ads, when selecting what you want to advertise there's a link that says either something off of facebook or something on Facebook and it will list pages you are an admin of.

Also if you go to your page it should show a link under the profile pic that says Promote this Page or Create an Ad in a green button for the page. Then you can target keywords, ages, locations, etc for your fan page.

Originally Posted by iplay

When you go the Facebook ads, when selecting what you want to advertise there's a link that says either something off of facebook or something on Facebook and it will list pages you are an admin of.

Also if you go to your page it should show a link under the profile pic that says Promote this Page or Create an Ad in a green button for the page. Then you can target keywords, ages, locations, etc for your fan page.

ah okay, I got you now
I thought you were paying ppl to join directly.

Originally Posted by Brandon Sheley

ah okay, I got you now
I thought you were paying ppl to join directly.

I'm not sure what you mean join directly... join the site or the fan page? We did do both. Joining the actual site was a little more costly but the registration sign ups were good.

From my experience with Facebook Ads, I find that you will save much more money and it is much more effective to advertise a well made Facebook page and not the site itself.

People will follow the advert through to the page and then normally will follow out of the page to the site itself, you just need to manage the page content well to be a direct extension to the advert itself. You tend to less for advertising your facebook page than you do your own site (makes sense as facebook are keeping the users on the site and can serve them more adverts) and as iplay mentioned once one user joins your page they offer free viral advertising as it then appears in all their friends pages that they fanned you...

Originally Posted by Ceri May

From my experience with Facebook Ads, I find that you will save much more money and it is much more effective to advertise a well made Facebook page and not the site itself.

People will follow the advert through to the page and then normally will follow out of the page to the site itself, you just need to manage the page content well to be a direct extension to the advert itself. You tend to less for advertising your facebook page than you do your own site (makes sense as facebook are keeping the users on the site and can serve them more adverts) and as iplay mentioned once one user joins your page they offer free viral advertising as it then appears in all their friends pages that they fanned you...

Agreed... because it seems to cost less and you get more conversion as they can just become a fan and more likely to do that as they don't have to navigate off the page they are on. And then your updates show in their news feeds from then on.

How can i create a facebook page without linking it to my personal facebook?
Facebook always asks your full name.

I have created a fan page. but i like to know how i can make a page like vbseo has on facebook.

I'll be following this thread.

you can create a page by going to Create a Page | Facebook