5 Ways to Make Money with Facebook

 

Make Money with Facebook

 

Would you like to tap into 1.6 billion users and generate income? Then you’ve probably wondered whether Facebook can really be utilized as a money-maker. Well, it certainly can, and there are marketing case studies detailing people who have done just that. If you are ready to move your business and online presence forward, then you likely want to know how to launch and maintain a profitable Facebook marketing campaign.

If you want to make money with Facebook, then you have to consider your revenue model. You have to figure out how to attract your users’ attention and get them to buy. That means you want to know what the conversion funnel looks like. You also want to consider how to integrate your Facebook approach with your existing marketing channels. So Let's take a closer look

Advertising-Based E-commerce

Facebook not only has an incredible reach, but it’s also extremely customisable. Their ads often transport clickers directly to an eCommerce site, rather than relying on fan marketing. A lot of people forget about this ads-direct-to-websites option, but it can be extremely lucrative. Fan marketing can be a time-commitment. And it requires some creativity. If you’re in short supply of that, direct-to-site traffic, then this really is the direction you should be heading in.

Fan Marketing E-commerce

Facebook is also host to lots of fan marketing, which in simple terms means being able to post into users’ news-feeds. Data analysis from PageLever and other companies have showed that even fan pages with millions of members only reach roughly 7% of fans. In fact, pages often count hundreds of thousands of fans who have been inactive for years. So does it really work? In a nutshell, yes it does, but you’ll garner more responsive fans through Facebook ads.

Fan marketing is also visibility-dependent. You have to be in your fans’ faces getting their attention regularly. Sometimes the answer is simply new fans, which has prompted many to use ads and create wholly new pages to increase a more targeted fan base. More up-to-date and stylish, these pages utilise a better understanding of their fans’ and the best ways to engage them.

Still dubious about whether this is really the answer in regard to how to make money with Facebook? Then just consider these success stories:

Rosehall Kennel managed a 4,000% ROI on its fan acquisition spend for their company, which sells German Shepard’s they’ve bred. Their sales cycle has been clipped and they’ve seen a decrease in discount requests as well.

Mark Ellingson’s company makes roses from baseballs. But Google Ad Words was no help because potential customers did not even know to search for this unusual product. However, from Facebook ads, they garnered a 473% ROI.

Ronando Long’s SuperHeroStuff.com started using Facebook in 2011 as their sole source of advertisement. The result? Revenues jumped 150%.

Email and Facebook Ads

Email marketing is a standard medium for most companies. But for these companies, Facebook Ads really make sense even in the absence of fan marketing. They can get more qualified subscribers, how? Because they can target 16 categories. For example, Facebook permits you to filter relationship status, gender, age, location, interests, workplace, education level, connection to pages for which they are the administrator, and even college majors. All you need to do is produce ad copy with a call-out to your targeted audience and you’re set.

In fact, a Fortune-500 company integrated social media marketing with their contest-based email campaign. The result was 14% click though rates, and an increase of their email open rate by 400%. One-fifth of their email subscribers also converted to fans.

Text Messaging and Facebook Ads

Right now, SMS marketing is not the norm. However, 4% of all mobile users still report responding to a coupon. In fact a popular fast food franchise decided to try SMS marketing and in doing so increased revenue. They posted on their Facebook page about free text message coupons. The result was a $65K increase in store revenue in just one month. Fans who opted in got a text coupon for every day of that month.

Generating Traffic

Facebook pages can also help grow the fan base for bloggers and publishers. You can post a link to every new article and boost traffic to your site. More traffic from new readers means more advertising revenue.

One company that’s a great example of this method is Proud Single Moms, whose Facebook page landed them with 98K fans. With their AdSense ads, they’d already employed the method of combining Google keywords with high click fees and mom-interesting topics. Links to their Facebook page on their daily blog posts drove traffic. Links on their FB page to their blog also drove traffic, and in both directions. Then, by using the AdWords’ Keyword Tool along with Facebook’s advertising platform, it helped them to discover profitable, interesting topics. The result? This company sold to another party after breaking even in six months on initial investment.

One of these models likely jumped out at you as a great fit. If not, then test Facebook’s direct ads. This is my personal (and most profitable) favourite with Facebook. Fan marketing is a time and creativity investment, so be sure you’re committed before jumping into that method. When people don’t understand that, they end up making posts that don’t generate interaction, which drives down their reach and value through Edge Rank.

Facebook really can be an absolutely terrific marketing tool, and you can certainly make money with Facebook, however it requires time, patience and investment. So don’t be disheartened if you’re not making money straight away, nobody does. Instead just keep at it, play with your ads and enjoy the process of making them work. Pure marketing is a creative process and one that should be thoroughly enjoyed, more so of course when those profits do eventually start rolling in.

Paul Graham
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