The important thing to note over here is, you don’t need to spend any money on Facebook. Facebook does give you the option to advertise with them. But the whole idea of Facebook marketing is mostly about its lack of expanse. You could get your business up and running on Facebook without spending a single dime, which is I think more important than anything else. Otherwise, there are other lesser expensive and somewhat better advertising options for your brand that you can use.

For any kind of business, giving out a complete set of information to potential customers is extremely important. Tell the users of what your business is all about. Incomplete profile information doesn’t go well with your reputation. It sends out an impression of lack of professionalism. After all, if you can’t take the time out to fill in your complete information, how do you expect others to take time out of their lives for you?

Another very important step to take is updating a profile picture. Perhaps, it’s the most important of all. A profile image can make or break customers. Most of the users decide from your profile image whether they want to visit your page or not. So it should be ethical, expressive, and most importantly, professional. Stop using pictures of cars or celebrities, please! It is considered unprofessional and fake.

Before you must decide on your page name, first check whether its vanity URL, or its quick URL is available. A quick URL is one that is easy to remember, such as facebook.com/SmartEarningMethods, and not a a bunch of weird characters and numbers. For any page, you are able to change the short URL to anything you want after getting 25 likes, provided that it is already available. To check for availability beforehand, use a free service such as Name Vine.

Social media integration is very important. Users use different social media for different purposes. Some might use one, while someone else might use another. You need to get your word out to both of them. The best way to do this is, integrate your social media. Use a service such as HootSuite. With HootSuite, you can schedule and publish your posts and updates across various social media at the same time. It will also allow you to automatically publish posts you share on one media onto another media. It can also be configured with your blog, so your blog posts will be automatically published. There are other ways to auto-publish blog posts on Facebook as well. Additionally, you can auto-publish Facebook posts on Twitter, and vice-versa.

Creating polls and asking your fans questions makes them feel engaged, which is the whole point of the exercise. That way, you can know what percentage of your fan base is actually active. You can also ask them questions regarding your service, suggestions, and feedback. This will really help you improve your service.

Facebook Insights is a neat little feature that will give you some idea about your performance. You can export Insights data from the Data tab into many formats. If you export it into spreadsheet format, you can easily see which of your statuses drove most likes, whether your audience likes your videos, etc. In short, it will tell you what areas are good, and what to work upon. This will help develop a better business understanding.

Photos spread like wildfire on Facebook! Most people won’t stop while scrolling to read your statuses. But they will notice your images, and what’s in them. And when they like those images, they are essentially showing it to their friends. And hence, the image spreads. It wouldn’t hurt to share a funny image once in a while. It’s best if the joke is related to the field your business is in, such as a programmer might share programmer humor which will invoke the interest of many people in the same field.

It is good to celebrate the milestones you’ve achieved by sharing them with your fans, for example reaching a 10,000 fans mark. Create a dedicated posts for your fans, and thank them all. Also, it would help if you offer them something in exchange for subscribing, such as an eBook.

Contests attract users like nothing else. They make them participate more. You can hold a contest for anything! You could urge people to share your page, and offer a reward to a few lucky winners if you reach a certain mark. There are people who have offered to give away an iPad for this. And even though most never reached their target, they did get a lot of promotion. And they didn’t have to give away anything!

Another good example of this that I’ve seen is, a friend of mine holds a weekly contest for the fan of the week. The person who likes and comments the most gets to be featured for one week. Although this is a very simple and humble reward, it did increase his fan engagement many-fold.

Engaging audience is what this is all about. Getting fans isn’t hard. Maintaining them is. Try to take out time from your life to answer to any comments you get. This makes your fans feel connected. Also, engage them in other ways by tagging them in your photos, or dedicating statuses to them, so they’ll feel valued.

And like always, visit other pages similar to yours, and see what their admins are doing. Don’t copy or mirror them. Just get some ideas. See how they engage with their audience. Also, interact with them and share your posts and updates with them. This will give you exposure from someone else’s traffic.

Those were some tips we had for you for now. Stay tuned for more on Facebook and Google+. And in the meantime, look at some of the related posts;