Merchant Guide

Facebook and its community is growing every day. When we can trust the numbers of Facebook´s statistics, there are more than 400 million active users on Facebook.What a great place for companies to interact with customers and to promote corporate/product branding.

In this arctile we want to show, how easy it is to create a Fan Page for your company and brand. So, let´s get started!

Common Mistakes

Many companies want to use Facebook for branding, that´s great, if you do it right! A very common mistake is to create a group or a private profile for your company.

Facebook has designed Fan Pages exactly for companies, so why not use them? There are many advantages we can extract from Fan Pages, which you’ll find outlined below.

How to create a Facebook Page

If you´re currently logged in to Facebook, log out now. Go to facebook.com, at the bottom on the right you can see “Create a Page for a celebrity, band or business.“. Click on it or use the link given here. Now you can select the category of your page and also the name of your page. If you select “Do not make Page publicly visible at this time.” no one can see your page now, you can design it and publish it, when you think you´re ready.

Info, Picture, Tabs and more

Info

Logo

To show your fans who you are, create an amazing logo, you can also add your phone number and your website to the picture. Not to small, but: your images should not be larger than  600px (height) x 200px (width).

Tabs

Beyond the standard tabs, like Wall and Info, you can create your own Tabs and also create your own content for this Tabs. Use this feature to build a well-designed landing page! Here´s a how-to guide which will help you with this steps: Mashable: Build a Facebook Landing Page

Share your content

So everythings fine, but your Wall looks like the Sahara dessert. If you have running a Business Blog or a Twitter account, connect them your Facebook Page to fill your Wall with great blog posts and tweets. To share your blog content add the app NetworkedBlogs and click on “Register a new Blog” and fill out required fields. To add your Twitter account to your page, use this link and click “Link to Twitter”.

You need Fans

First rule: Ask all your friends! Why not? It´s  your business which you want to promote. Also add a Facebook-Badge to your Blog, so every blog reader can also become your Faceook Fan. Some Forums also have groups called  “Facebook Fan Exchange”. That´s another way to get friend on you Facebook Fan Page.

And if you share high quality content, your Fan group will grow constantly.

Another hint: When you have reached 25 Fans you can create your own Facebook Fan Page URL. Goto http://facebook.com/username and click on “Set a username for your Pages“, but be careful, once created you can never change this name.

Here you can see the Social Business Bank Fan Page, hop on the link and become a fan now.

Good Luck!

For startups and established companies alike viral marketing is a highly recommended way to boost brands and generate the sales. But what exactly is Viral Marketing?

Viral Marketing is a marketing technique where companies and organisations use social networks and other media resources like TV or Radio to broadcast an extraordinary or profound message. With this message, companies call attention to a product or a service they offer or promote brand recognition. It´s called “viral marketing” or “viral advertising” because the marketing campaign is designed to be forwarded from one viewer to the next. Viral campaigns can be spread out via many services, the most common services being Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, E-Mail and word of mouth.

Sounds great? Finding a unique and amazing – often humerous – message which triggers so much attention that viewers republish it takes some thinking “outside the box”. In many viral marketing campaigns the product or brand is harldy mentioned at all. We have collected some great campaigns for you to give you some ideas how to create your own amazing viral marketing campaign.

Guys Backflipping Into Jeans – Levi’s

“This video gets major points in the “wow, that’s mad” department, which is a tactic that seems to consistently go well with viral videos. Plus, Levi’s understood the importance of being understated in this video. Try to be subtle, if that’s hard on you – try to be a bit more british in your viral ad campaign. People really dislike the shill.”

Million Dollar Homepage: Pixels for sale on an “online billboard.”

“This campaign offered advertisers the unique chance to buy a spot on the MillionDollarHomepage at $1 per pixel. You could buy as many pixels as you want, and once all 1,000,000 pixels were sold the site would stay like that forever. Well this 21 year old college student quickly sold every pixel, earning a million dollars to comfortably live the student way of life.”

Blendtec: Will it blend?

“This series of online videos were made to demonstrate how powerful these Blendtec blenders really are. They would take common objects we all can relate to, such as an iPhone, and throw them in the blender to show you, well poor iPhone… Many of their videos have gotten millions of views, taking them from a brand most people didn’t know about to an established leader in their industry.”

Nike: A Touch of Gold

“A Nike rep was dispatched to give Ronaldinho his new Nike soccer cleats, with a camera man covering the whole thing. Ronaldinho proceeds to put the cleats on, and perform some amazing tricks with the soccer ball and his new Nikes. Ronaldinho’s performance is the touch of gold, and the people who were smart enough to decide to use this as a campaign made a really smart move. This has become one of the most viewed sports related viral videos online.”

Sheep LED

“Samsung goes extraordinary lengths to show the power of LEDs in one of the most genuine and breathtaking pieces of choreography you are ever likely to see – sheer brilliance (pun intended).”