The Biggest Mistakes and Myths Surrounding Facebook Marketing

Everyone and their Mother likes to talk about Facebook marketing. A
lot of the time it seems that the advice that they give is nothing
more than "join Facebook and talk about your business and invite the
people you know to join your fan page, and you will be doing
everything right." While there is some truth to this statement, and
while it certainly helps to join Facebook if you are going to market
on it, being successful at this endeavor just isn't that simple. Here
are some of the biggest myths people believe and the mistakes that
they create when it comes to marketing on Facebook.�First, there is
the very persistent myth that Facebook is only for young people. This
just isn't true, though it's easy to see where the myth came from. In
the beginning Facebook was something that was only open to college
students. It then opened up to high school students as well before it
ended up opening up to anyone who wanted to join it. Because Facebook
started out as a site almost exclusively for the under-22 set, it
makes sense that it has this stigma as only being for youth.But the
fact of the matter is Facebook is now relatively evenly spread out
demographically. It is still concentrated among younger people (with
63% of users being 34 or younger) that still leaves a full 37% of
users on Facebook being 35 years old or older, and these demographics
are evening out more and more every day.Next, people think that
Facebook exists solely for social reasons. This is also due to the
fact that when it first started out Facebook was solely used for
social reasons. In the beginning, there was little no extra
functionality on the site besides adding friends, sending messages,
poking people, posting photos and writing on your friend's walls.
Since then the site has opened up with a wide variety of applications
and extra functions that make it much more than simply a social
hub.Besides, this reputation of Facebook being a social website
actually works in your favor when you are marketing on it. People tend
to trust their friends and peers more than any other source of
information when it comes to products and services, and this is the
primary way that information travels through Facebook - through your
friends, which makes your site seem more viable when people see you
mentioned on their friend's profiles.Finally, people think that
successfully marketing on Facebook is just too expensive and time
consuming to be a viable method for marketing their products or
services. This is just patently false. Facebook has been successful as
it has been because of the speed and ease by which information can be
shared and spread using the site. Facebook is viral by nature, and
good viral marketing is cheap, quick and effective.The relationships
on Facebook are also long term in nature, much like an email list
newsletter. This long term nature can make it seem really time
consuming and slow moving, but that makes no sense. No one says that
email lists take too much time and money to work, so there's no real
reason to feel this way about Facebook marketing.