Facebook has become an incredible online community that is a gold mine for anyone interested in advertising or creating brand awarness. Not only does Facebook have over 100 Million active users, but it has many great ways for business owners to reach these users in a legit way. Below we will talk about the core advertising methods you can dabble in on Facebook and how you can make the most of them.

5 Ways to Promote Your Business on Facebook

1. Facebook Profiles

Creating a profile is the most basic thing you can do on Facebook and it is required if you want to do anything else such as create a group or page. Make sure you fully fill out your profile because a full profile looks a lot more interesting then an empty one. You can also add your website URL in several locations and be sure to talk about your business and plug your website URL in the appropriate spots as mentioned.

Then you should start adding friends to your profile each day. The Current limit is 5,000 friends but this may be lifted in the future. If you add 20 friends a day which would take you maybe 5 minutes in one month you will have 600 friends! From my testing you will have to type in a CAPTCHA or anti spam code for the first 10-15 friend adds, but after that it seemed to go away and it was a lot quicker to add friends. I wouldn’t not recommend adding to many friends each day because it will come off as spammy.

Now that you have your profile created and optimized you can create a Facebook group or even better a Facebook page, both of which we will go over below.

2. Facebook Groups

Groups were available before pages and are more of a place for users to discuss topics such as graphic design or cars. Its almost like a mini forums. The benefits for group owners is they are very viral and you can bulk invite all you friends to join your group. The problem is they are not indexed and not available to view unless you are a member of Facebook.

I recommend creating a Facebook group for your business, but honestly Facebook pages are really where its at and you should focus your efforts on your page instead of your group.

3. Facebook Pages

Facebook pages are all about business and have many of the same features available as groups, but with some extra key features available. The main benefit of pages is the fact that they are indexed by Google and available to view even if you are not a member so promoting the page is easy.

When creating your page make sure you use your most important keyword as the page name so that it shows as the page title, making your page more SEO friendly. Like you did with your profile, fill out your Facebook page with all relevant information about your business, website URLS and so on.

The best way to promote your page is to offer some sort of giveaway if you are not a major brand. This way you give a people a reason to become a fan of page. Once they are a fan you can send updates which is the best part of having a Facebook page for your business.

Groups may work well virally, but so do Facebook pages. Whenever some one becomes a fan of your page it shows up in their profile and looks something like this: Person’s Name, Became a fan of Your Business Name.

So if you give your page a good jump start it could really take off. The number of fans you can have has no limit and some pages have anywhere from several thousand fans to over 500 thousand fans!

So if you wanted to focus on one thing I would highly recommend creating a Facebook page, instead of a group and putting all your advertising efforts towards the Facebook page.

Some Example of Popular Facebook Pages

• Pizza
• Domino’s Pizza
• Pizza Hut

4. Facebook Applications

The introduction of Facebook Applications is probably the most popular move made by Facebook to date. They released their API so developers and business owners could collaborate to create fun and cool applications that engage users. The applications created so far vary in purpose; some are fun games, some are useful and some are directly related and tied into businesses.

Many popular applications have hundreds of thousands of monthly active users and that information speaks for itself, so if you want to read more about creating applications for Facebook, I highly recommend checking out the Facebook Developers page. Once you have an application created, be sure to add it to your profile and to your Facebook group and page!

5. Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are a great way to really increase your exposure using highly targeted CPC and CPM Advertising. You can target users by age, gender, location, interests, and even attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.

The best part is you can either advertise an external website or a Facebook page. So if you created a page earlier for your business and you are looking to build up your facebook fan page you can do so easily by driving the traffic form your advertisements directly to your page.

So join Facebook today and start working on your Facebook promotions, because if your competition is not on Facebook already, they will be soon!