I attended the AZIMA function last night with Facebook. What a great experience! I met some great new people and learned some very interesting things about Facebook and how it helps people market their brand and products. Did you know that 31% of social networking happens while users are watching TV? Or how about that users spend an average of 5 hours per week on Facebook? With more than 250 million users and growing, Facebook is a great place to concentrate your digital marketing efforts.

The great thing about Facebook is that the users are real. Facebook concentrates on making sure that profiles belong to real people. Therefore, you know that your market segment is genuine. And, using Facebook’s marketing tools, you can drill your market segment down to very specific people. So, if you wanted to find women in Connecticut that own cats and like iced tea, you’d be able to find them on Facebook.

Facebook offers two products that can help you make your social marketing experience great: Engagement Ads and Fan Pages. If you use Facebook, then you’ve seen Engagement ads. They run on the righthand side of your home page. The biggest benefit to investing in Engagement Ads is their virality. Engagement Ads have the opportunity to turn 1 impression into many impressions. How does this happen? When you structure your ads correctly, people interract with ads the same way that they interract with other content on the site. So that ad you post has the potential to be seen on millions of news feeds all across Facebook. As soon as a user takes action on that ad, it shows up in their news feed. Then, their friends take action on the same ad and their friends take action and…you see where I’m going with this. Another great thing about Engagement Ads is that they are targeted specifically at users based on information in their profile. Even their status updates are included in keyword searches for 30 days. So, essentially, you get the skinny on people’s interests direct from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

Facebook offered some great tips on using Engagement Ads:

1. Use clear copy and imagery – make sure your ads are clear to people. If you’re selling them a chocolate chip cookie, then the best headline should have something to do with cookies and the image should have a cookie in it as well.
2. Ask relevant, fun questions. Use a poll! Ask users what they like on their sandwiches or how they take their coffee. Make it all about them and they will come.
3. Communicate a benefit – Tell users why it’s great to be your fan. Or just give them something free! Victoria’s Secret gave away panties to people who became their fan. Who doesn’t love free panties?

Another great marketing tool is the Fan Pages themselves. The great thing about Fan Pages is that they allow you to interract with your fans on a regular basis. The best way to do this is by publishing regular status updates to your Fan Page. When someone is a fan of your page, any status updates appear in their news feed. People view their news feed ten times more than they view a fan page, so if you want people looking at your content, you have to use that publishing option. Facebook recommends that marketers use a publishing calendar to make sure that you are posting regular updates.

The next thing to make sure you are doing on your Fan Page is to make sure you’re keeping it real. People don’t want to interract with a nameless, faceless company! In this day and age, where you can find out what Ashton Kutcher had for breakfast, people expect to interract with real people.

Facebook has great analytics tools so use them. Analyze, adjust, optimize. Make sure you’re getting the most out of your ads and pages!  Here are some things you can do to get started marketing on Facebook today:

• Become a fan of Facebook marketing – www.facebook.com/marketing
• Become a fan of Facebook ads – www.facebook.com/facebookads
• Start your own facebook page here. There’s no better way to learn something than to dive in and do it yourself.
• Reach out. Find other people in social marketing and connect with them.