This post provides a high level summary of my interview of Justin Levy, author of Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign 
The written part of this post is a very high level overview of using FaceBook for marketing purposes. If you want the most out of Justin, I encourage you to listen to entire show, then buy Justin's book to apply detailed advice to your unique situation. To listen, scroll to the bottom of this post, click the gray arrow, turn up the volume and enjoy. You can also download the podcast to your favorite mobile device or on iTunes. If you prefer to read, here is some of what Justin told me, paraphrased of course, with time stamps so you can easily find what interests you most.
- Community (1:47). Since there are tons of people who care a lot generally about the types of products you offer, the process of creating community on FaceBook is all about causing people to “bubble up” from this massive number and into your sphere of influence. In other words, from your direct and indirect connections to thousands upon thousands of people, you can create niche community by causing the people who are most interested in what you have to offer to bubble up to the surface so you can engage with them. This is the foundation of any type of marketing campaign, social media or otherwise.
No matter what you plan to do next, you must first create community.
- Promotion (34:00). Once a community exists, you can begin to use FaceBook as a promotional tool to share things like product photos, trade show appearances, book signings, podcast schedules, new product releases and anything else you want your community to know about. If you carefully balance non-promotional engagement with things you want to promote, you will eventually be rewarded when your community begins to promote things with and for you. Justin shared some good stories about this using Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk as examples.
- Advertising (36:01). With Facebook, you can expand your community by promoting things using advertising. FaceBook makes it effective and easy to control costs by allowing you to target ads via things geographic region, gender, by age, interest and more. The ads appear in the right sidebar of the profile pages of the people who fit the description you provide to FaceBook when you set up your ad. We didn't get a chance to go into depth on this, so you might enjoy this post about how to avoid launching cheesey FaceBook ad campaigns.
To give FaceBook advertising a try, click here.
Oh! And don't miss the part starting at 2:39 podcast where Justin gives a quick rundown about how FaceBook started. (You won't believe what the company's original name was.”) Also, starting at 21:00, you'll want to hear why Justin is adamantly opposed to cross-posting between FaceBook and other social media platforms.
About Justin Levy
Justin Levy leads social communications at Citrix Online where he helps to develop and execute social media strategies as part of the corporate communications team, as well as being the editor-in-chief of Workshifting.com, a blog focused on sharing resources on telecommuting, online tools, travel, technology, productivity, work/life balance and helping you to shift when, where and how you work. Justinis an award-winning social, search, and viral marketing scientist at HubSpot and author of author of Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign (2nd Edition) (Que Biz-Tech)
How to Listen to the Show
This post contains my paraphrases of the information Justin shared. To hear it from the horse's mouth yourself, listen to the entire 60-minute show using one of these options:
- Download it on iTunes. (It usually takes a day or two for iTunes to feed the show there.)
- Click on the arrow at the bottom of this post to listen now!
- Because I have not had a chance to load all of my shows to this blog, you can listen to hundreds of interviews from 2005 to 2010, each one as relevant today as it was when I recorded it, at my Indie Business Radio site.
Question: How can you employ Justin's simple tips for using FaceBook to plan a successful social media campaign? What tips can you share?
