How to Make Money With Facebook
The number of people using social networking sites is tough to imagine. Let's take a look at Facebook alone, which now has over 500 million users worldwide. Over half of those members login to Facebook each and every day. The average user has 130 friends, spends more than two hours per month on the site, and is connected to 80 community pages, groups, and events.
It isn't just big, but the users are active as well creating 3 new pieces of content each day. 30 billions links, stories, blog posts, photos and other pieces of content are shared each month.
Facebook users are turning to their mobile devices more all the time. More than 150 million people are currently accessing the site though a mobile device and those users are more than twice as active as their non-mobile counterparts.
What all of this means is that there is a large audience waiting for you to tap into. Imagine having a Facebook fan page with over $1 million targeted fans. All of these users have expressed an interest in whatever product or service you are tied to. What if you sent an affiliate offer to these fans? Can you imagine how much money you could make off of just a single blast?
With our how to make money with Facebook series, we are going to offer you a step-by-step guide on how you can create fan pages with a large number of followers. Then we are going to show you how to take advantage of these fan sites so you can monetize them and make money off of the Facebook system. You won't need to use their pay-per-click advertising to do it either.
Our system works like this: create profiles and then learn how to get more Facebook friends, learn how to create facebook fan pages that people will join, getting your friends to become fans of your page, and then how to make money off of that fan page by using it to promote your sites and/or products.
How to Create Your Fan Page
Facebook pages are different than personal profiles. Businesses can't have profiles on Facebook, but they can have pages to house all of the pertinent company information they want to display. The technical details of creating a fan page are not difficult to master and you can easily walk through the steps on Facebook's create a page section. With this article we are more concerned with a creating the type of page that people will actually become a fan of and not the generic how-to fill out the forms.
Why Even Have a Facebook Page?
This is a question that you should be asking before wasting your time putting something together just to have it. What are the benefits? Here is a short list:
1. Fan pages are open to the public and open to the search engines to index. This means people can find you without actually having to be your fan.
2. Facebook allows pages to have a custom URL once there are a certain number of fans.
3. Pages can have message boards that allow users to interact
4. There are detailed traffic statistics covering the demographics of the fans of your page.
5. Facebook allows admins to message all of the fans, update the page's status which will show in each fans' live feed
All of those will help you increase your exposure and/or help you gain trust with potential customers.
Title of Your Fan Page
The first key in creating your fan page is to start with a good title. Don't make the title generic or a name that people have never heard of. You want to go for some name recognition, a belief or a cause, or some kind of gimmick that piggybacks off a current event or something in popular culture. You are targeting a certain niche or demographic with your page so make sure your title shows that.
Quality
You want quality with your fan page. Don't just create a fan page just to say you have one and then never update it, or just update it with non-stop spam offers. If you want people to join and stay fans of your page, or better yet, to recommend your fan page to their friends then you have to provide them with quality content. Sure you can broadcast special offers, but do it occasionally (about once per week) and not all of the time. Funny status updates keep people interested in everything else related to your fan page. If you deliver value such as solving a problem or offering current events then it is more likely the friends of your current fans will also join.
Admins
Create more than one admin for your page. This is important if you are going to get aggressive in trying to add people as friends in order to refer them to your page. If your account has problems, the page could disappear if you are the only admin and you have wasted a lot of time and effort gathering a group that you can't use.
Those are three quick tips in creating a fan page that people will actually join and that you can actually use to make money off of Facebook.
What Not to Do on Facebook
The Oatmeal had a funny little list of the different kinds of people that annoy the hell out of everyone else on Facebook, so I thought it would be a good list to point out. If you are into Internet Marketing then you need to pay special attention to "The Desperate Marketer" who spams the hell out of all of their friends to join their fan pages and what not. Trust me, if I hardly know you to begin with and as soon as we are friends on Facebook you start bombarding me with this crap, you will be defriended immediately.
Of course, you should probably avoid any "Horrible Photo Taggers" if you want to land a job or maintain any respect in a professional capacity. There have been a few untimely snapshots taken of me in a less than sober state, and not only do I untag myself but kindly ask my "friend" to refrain from embarrassing me in the future (to which the common reply is, "quit embarrassing yourself." Touché).
Personally, when someone goes crazy inviting me to play games, I just block the application. I haven't gotten into any of them and can't see how bugging the shit out of your friends should reward you in any shape or form.
If you have any other words of wisdom on what not to do on Facebook, let me hear about them.