Marketing for Free on Facebook

So much more than just a social arena for friends and family, Facebook has become a goldmine for marketers. This venue is a place where millions of people already interact. Although Facebook offers directed advertising for a fee, there are plenty of ways to market your business for free on Facebook. One of the best ways to engage your readers is to host contests. I have already posted this one that was mildly effective.

I got a lot of responses and shares, and it reached over 500 people, but only two new likes resulted in that effort. I plan to create another more polished contest using Shortstack or Pagedomo, since the type of contest I created here is actually against Facebook policy.

Here are a couple of the other marketing posts, one that I have already posted, and one that is scheduled.

In an attempt to get readers familiar with my new business blog, I have a post scheduled for December 31st giving readers a couple of pieces of information regarding this upcoming tax filing season. I opted to use the whole URL instead of a call to action hyperlink so that people can see that it's my company blog, possible leading to a subscribing user.

Another way to keep readers engaged is to post humorous topic-related videos on the business. Who hasn't spent a longer-than-expected portion of an afternoon watching funny videos on youtube? The difficulty for me has been finding funny tax or immigration videos- not exactly comedy material. After a lengthy search, I found a parody H&R Block video that I turned into a witty ad for my business.

Additionally, I plan to explore hosting an Event on Facebook. I haven't played around with this enough yet to actually create one, but I will consider a free seminar or webinar.

As with my wife's business, the key to success in online marketing is building relationships and gaining credibility. My hope is that my posts will do just that.