Facebook Marketing Tips for the 2011 Holiday Season

A recent study by Lab42, a market research company out of Chicago, conducted a study around consumer behaviors for the 2011 holiday season.

The study indicates a large number of consumers (61%) will use social networks to do research before purchasing the perfect gift.  Of those, 72% of the respondents indicated they would use Facebook for research.    For businesses, this presents a huge opportunity to increase awareness, improve sales and see a ROI on your social media marketing efforts.

Here are a few tips to help you prepare for the holiday season:

Develop A Strategy. Creating a strategy will help you and your employees to promote your products and services more effectively.

Create Fun Promotions For Your Fans. There’s nothing like the holidays to get people in a festive mood. Create promotions to inspire your fans to share fun photos, great stories and most of all to have fun.

Use Facebook Ads. Developing Facebook ads around holiday promotions can help increase awareness. If you have a physical location, you can use Facebook’s geographic targeting ability to drive customers in stores for shopping. If you’re an online business, you can use Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website/e-commerce site.

Use Facebook For Customer Service. Purchasing that perfect gift can be challenging for many people. Using Facebook to help answer questions and offer advice can be a great opportunity to increase sales and make a lot of customers happy.

Extras

Here are a few additional tips to include into your strategy:

Promote Likes & Shares.  Post photos of products and ask people to like the post.  When a Facebook user clicks “like” or “share” it automatically updates the information to their wall.  Whats amazing is the average Facebook user has 130 friends who could potentially see the update, expanding your market base exponentially.

Respond to Comments.  One of the best ways to keep the conversation flowing is by responding to comments.

Use Pictures & Video.  Using images and video can increase engagement by as much as 200%!  It’s a lot like window shopping, you can grab the viewer’s attention much easier with pictures than words.

For more information on Facebook Marketing strategy or need help developing a social strategy that is right for your business, contact us!

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