Facebook has changed the world in more ways then one, for businesses is the most important. We all have seen what facebook can do whether positive or negative it has effectively change the global marketing arena for good. Even driving through town you can see signs up stating, "find us on facebook." With a facebook fan page you can reach hundreds of people easily and effectively and most importantly for free. As a small business free or cheap advertising is a necessity.
So I imagine you have seen things on the news about peoples lives being ruined on facebook and you will notice it is always facebook that is to blame. Well I hate to say the obvious but the truth is; it is the people involved fault not facebook. Facebook is a tool nothing more nothing less. For example if you hit someone in the head with a shovel you cant blame the shovel. Used correctly facebook offers businesses a far greater reach then they could attain with mere marketing. For example in 2010 I had a total of 92 facebook fans largely family and personal friends and made a total of 3 sales online. Granted this was partly do to lack of effort on my part. Since the beginning of this year I have gone from 92 to 710 fans on my facebook fan page. How I did this was by promoting my business by sharing new items on craft supplier walls, entering jewelry competitions, doing giveaways and sponsoring giveaways, and having people share it. So far this year I have made 28 sales (13 for a shop in another city with the possibility of more to come) through facebook just from word of mouth. This is the beauty of social networking.
Now you can also pay per click on facebook and I highly recommend it, if you already are planning on doing pay per click advertising. Facebooks advertising has the most effective targeting system I have ever dealt with. You can choose to market to only people with in your city, by age, relationship, employment status, birthdate, sex, and more. This means if you have done your homework and know your target demographic you can affordable advertise only to that specified group. I have been selling my jewelry for 2 years and during that time period I have tried pay per click advertising with google, yahoo, and facebook. I can honestly say facebook gave me the most bang for my buck. I use facebooks wonderful pay per thousand for .20 I can advertise to a thousand people and it can even go cheaper then that. I choose pay per thousand because it is a lower cost method and it had the most clicks. I spent quite awhile doing market research on this medium. The one huge con with facebook advertising is they randomly charge for the costs. You could have a monthly budget of $30 (I highly recommend starting with just a week long campaign. They will email it when your advertising ends so you can see what you need to improve on.) during that month facebook may charge multiple times with only part of your costs. For this reason alone I suggest you either tie it to your paypal debit card or a prepaid visa and not to your personal bank account.
