As internet marketers, we’re all familiar with the expression “the money is in the list“, a concept that is widely promoted as probably one of the most effective and powerful mechanism through which to drastically improve conversions to your website. Whether building a list through a dedicated lead capture system or just maintaining a contact list of existing customers, the primary objective of such lists is to encourage customer loyalty and ultimately translate into repeat business through the continued relationship management of your customers.

While conventional approaches to list building – through offering some incentive such as a free report, ebook in exchange for a prospective lead’s contact information – may have been an effective method for achieving this in the past, the process of building this into a site often involves costs for website design rework, creating the incentive itself and possibly even ongoing costs where a 3rd party email management services be used to support and manage these lists (such as aWeber).

Enter the world of Social Media and Facebook marketing. We’ve all seen the infamous ‘Like’ buttons appearing across the internet, so let’s take a closer look at what these actually mean and more importantly what they can do for your business.

Firstly, to draw reference to Facebook’s own definition of Like Buttons;

The Like button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website.

When your Web page represents a real-world entity, things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants, use the Open Graph protocol to specify information about the entity. If you include Open Graph tags on your Web page, your page becomes equivalent to a Facebook page. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the “Likes and Interests” section of the user’s profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page will show up in same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content.

I hear you saying “Open Graph tags!? OMG I have to code something??”. Open graph tags are definitely the more advanced ‘Like’ integration option and may well go beyond the average website owner comfort zones to implement, however don’t be scared away just yet. The Like button itself – which Facebook provides you the code for via a graphical user interface – is still an extremely powerful, simple and very effective tool for building a list of followers to your site. Let’s take a look at how to go about setting this up for your business.

Creating the Facebook page is simple;

1. Log into your Facebook account (no need to create a new account if you’re already signed up)
2. Create a new page for your business; http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. I generally go with Brand / Product and then a Website subcategory.
3. Give the page a name reflective of your business.
4. Customize your page to give it a picture (company logo), then edit your information to provide some company details.
5. Make a few wall posts; perhaps to introduce new product lines, promotional offers, upcoming sales etc – make sure to includes some pictures also to keep the wall looking fresh and interesting.

Brilliant – so we’re half way there now! Next, to generate your Facebook ‘Like’ button;

1. Firstly grab a copy of your page URL. This will look something like; https://www.facebook.com/pages/Internet-Marketing-Advantage-Pty-Ltd/138683548650
2. Next, we jump across to the Developers pages to create a social plugin; http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
3. We want to create a like button, so select this social plugin option. This will take us to the graphical user interface for creation of you like button;
4. Paste your new company page URL into the “URL to Like” section at the top
5. Configure the appearance options below to suit your requirements, then..
6. Click ‘Get Code’ to export the FBML or iFrame code to plug directly into your website!
7. See example at the bottom of this page, and click ‘Like’ to see how it works

The application of your Like button code is quite extensive. As the purpose of this being to connect your prospective clients to your new Facebook company page, you can (should) include this code directly onto your main company website, any online press releases, emails to your clients – basically anything you can which allows for HTML code to be included.

As you build your Facebook Like list, you’ll be able to directly communicate with your list through your Company’s Facebook page wall updates. Whenever you make a post to your wall, this immediately appears in your Like list’s friend feed. Then if they like your post, they can then click ‘Like’ again to put this on their own wall which shows your wall post to their friends, and so on… so if you’re having a sale on the weekend, you can quickly see how you can reach a large number of people very quickly and effectively using this technology – making this a VERY powerful marketing tool to have!

For more information on how you can drastically improve the effectiveness of your Facebook page, simply come to our Facebook page and click LIKE!