Should Facebook be used for brand building or short-term promotion?

Facebook can be used for both brand building and short-term promotions. As with all social media Facebook is not something that you can pick up and put down, it needs to be used consistently for the best results, however as long as you are consistent over time – short- or long-term you can get results. It does take time to get those results, but this depends on how well known your business is, short-term can be a challenge if your business is new or relatively unknown.

Since most of the time we talk about using Facebook for long-term brand building, I thought I’d give examples of you can use it for a short-term promotion:

• If you don’t have a Facebook page then use Facebook ads to promote your activity. You can create very targeted ads that will be seen by your target audience.
• You can set up a Facebook page just for the promotion – Havaianas did a great job of this with their Australia Day Thong Challenge which was just for three events over three months, but they got over 6,000 people to the page.
• Create an event on your Facebook page, if you have one, for the promotion remember events don’t have to be physical activities, they can be virtual as well. The advantages of an event is that they are fully searchable on Facebook, so people who are not on your page can find them.
• You could approach other pages and ask them to promote your promotion, you just need to find a page that has a relevant audience, you could offer the page owner something for helping you, such as free tickets to giveaway, or a special offer for their page likers – get creative.
• Create the promotion on your website, and then send out a message to all your friends on your personal Facebook profile asking them to share the message with their friends.
• If you have a Facebook page, then send an update message to all your page likers about the promotion – this goes to them as a message, rather than a wall post, so it won’t disappear in their news feed.

If you are using Facebook for a short-term promotion without having an established (as in it’s been going for a few months) Facebook page, it will be harder – I won’t lie to you. But as you can see, if you can get creative there are things you can do to promote your business.

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks www.MyMocks.com, founder of Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media www.Facebook.com/SocialRabbit and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.