It's clear that "Social marketing" is currently one of the key buzzwords in marketing today. The core of this concept is leveraging the online social networks of products'/services'/companies'/people's consumers/fans.
One of the leaders in this field is clearly Facebook, which although doesn't quite have the size of MySpace, has carefully built a system that can very specifically target its users and their friends (and has come under fire a number of times for both).
There are an increasing number of ways to target users of Facebook, but this post is going to focus on the concept of Facebook pages and what they offer marketeers.
So what exactly is a Facebook Page? It is a static page that represents and describes a business, product, brand or person (such as singers, actors or politicians). Around this static description you can add a number of Facebook applications, such as image galleries, a music or video player, discussion boards and a wall where fans of that Page's subject can post their messages for all to see. An example Facebook page can be seen here.
Many people reading the above may be thinking that Facebook Pages are quite similar to Facebook Groups and they'd be right. However, there are a few key differences between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups.
Firstly, Facebook Pages are publicly accessible and indexable by Google and other search engines, so you do not in fact need a Facebook account to view (most of) or even randomly find a Facebook page. On a positive note for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Pages' names are automatically inserted into the URL, so that you end up with something like: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Your-Page-Name/10376020809. I was disappointed by the addition of the random numbers at the end of the URL as this makes it less friendly for relaying to people beyond clickable links (for example on physical marketing materials). By comparison, Facebook Groups are not publicly searchable by Google and other search engines and also do not use the more friendly URLs.
Secondly, there is the viral element that is built into the core of Pages. When someone becomes a 'Fan' of a Page (i.e. the person or thing that page represents), an announcement is made to all that person's Facebook friends in their feed. The hope is that by people seeing what products/services/brands/artists their friends endorse, those people will look to find out more and hopefully become fans themselves, perpetuating endorsement of the brand virally to their own networks.
The most important difference between a Page and a Group is the useful statistical tools that come built into Pages. As well as being able to see a graphs on the number of unique visitors, page views, fans, discussion topics and wall posts etc.
You also get a demographic breakdown of your fans by gender and age. These useful statistics will help marketeers gauge how successful they have been in reaching their target numbers and demographic. If you are launching a new brand which has no preconceived gender or age bias, this could be a very useful tool for monitoring who is being attracted to it. You could then either go on to reinforce that image or make changes to your brand/marketing which move it in the desired direction.
Facebook now makes it easy to buy advertisements to promote your Page to your target demographic. As you choose the appropriate age range, gender, location, relationship status etc. you want to target, the approximate number of people that would receive the ad becomes less and less. This means that you can not only effectively target your chosen audience, but you could also design separate campaigns for multiple demographics where a different banner design or slogan may work better. You could also use it as a test marketing ground for banner design effectiveness by say splitting up your target demographics by college/sub-location, giving them different ads and monitoring the click-through effectiveness.
After choosing your target audience, you get to create your banner ad that is somewhat reminiscent of Google Adwords ads, but also allows you to include an image. While you may not be able to create the whizz-bang, multimedia, punch the monkey ad you would like, this back-to-basics approach will force you to hone your key message/wording and visual for the campaign and is invaluable in that respect.
The final step is defining your budget for daily ad-spend, how much you are willing to pay per click or view and when the campaign should run. The higher you bid for clicks or views, the more your ad will be shown to your target audience. If you are only testing your campaign, I would start with a lower bid, just to see how many impressions and clicks you get, and if that does prove worthwhile, then ramp up your budget. If you are running separate ads to target different demographics, allocate a greater budget to those core demographic groups.
My recommendation is to purely focus your Facebook advertising budget on your core audience who will ultimately become champions of your brand. As they become fans, write messages on the discussion board or wall or do any other action that will virally spread their endorsement of the brand to their online social network, you will ultimately reach your secondary audiences anyway.
Don't forget, if you are already an existing user of Facebook with a large friend list, you can directly message your existing friends to build up the initial effect. You can also search for relevant Groups and post messages in their discussion board. However, don't do either of these things too heavily or Facebook will threaten to block your account. If you do get a warning or two, then it's probably better to hold back and time to start buying ads.
In short, it takes little/no technical knowledge or cost to set-up a Facebook Page for your product/service/company/brand/artist and then also a very little to start promoting it. If you are looking for an easy way to hop on the social/viral bandwagon, this is probably your best bet.