SimplyCast: Interactive Marketing Blog

By now almost all of you are either using Facebook or have at least heard your kids talking about it. For my parents and the handful of other people who may not know what it is, Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.

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So can Facebook help you with your email marketing? Most definitely, if you know how to use it properly.

If a large portion of your subscriber list is already on Facebook, you can provide tools in your email campaigns to allow your readers to help share your content.

This will give you the power to leverage your growing audience and gain much more visibility for your content or message.

This of course has the potential to lead to more subscribers and conversions as you share your content with your network of subscribers.

Here are a few ways you can start to integrate Facebook into your email marketing campaigns.

Sharing Links from Email to Facebook

To be able to share your content or message on Facebook, you need to use the share URL that Facebook has created. By doing this, it will create a preview of your content, which can then be posted to a Facebook profile or sent as a direct message.

The simplest way to give a subscriber the option to share your link is to add this code into your email.

Just replace URL with the link you want to share.

For example here is the link for this blog post set up so you can share it on Facebook.

Share this post on Facebook

A lot of sites will also feature a Facebook button on their website or in their email to do the same thing.

After you click on the link, it creates a preview with optional image selections from the page URL provided. Then the fun begins.

Once the link is posted to a reader’s profile, their wall is updated, which basically is telling their friends that they have read or feel the link is important.

This not only shows up on the profile page, but also shows up in the news feed of their friends.

Showing up in multiple news feeds is when you start to leverage that user’s entire friend list. This process has the potential to move virally as people leave comments or share the item with their friends and family.

Ask Subscribers to Become Fans

SimplyCast recently set up a Facebook page of our own and we are in the process of building up a list of fans. The best way for us to do that is to simply ask you to become a fan of our service.

This is where promoting your Facebook page in email starts to blur the line between email marketing and social networking.

When someone visits our page and clicks on the “become a fan” link, they are essentially opting-in to Facebook’s version of email marketing, which Facebook calls “updates”.

When a user logs in to their Facebook account, they will be notified of any updates and directed to their Facebook inbox.

Just like in email marketing, users are given the ability to opt-out of these updates or report them as spam.

Following email marketing’s best practices on frequency apply here as well. Don’t over communicate because that will just end up labeling you as a spammer and people will start to opt-out from your updates.

Test to See What Works Best

Just like with any other part of email marketing, there is no sure way to have continued success. One strategy could work for a few months and then it stops for now logical reason.

Tinker around with the location of your sharing links inside your email and even consider adding the same kind of links to your company blogs, email signatures and business cards.

Now do you see the power of Facebook when it comes to your email marketing?

Facebook is much more than a place to share photos and let your friends know your current status. It is an endless source of potential subscribers for your business and if used in the proper ways.

Now go and check out SimplyCast’s Facebook page and let us know what you think.

SimplyCast’s Interactive Marketing Suite includes:
Email Marketing | Survey Marketing | Event Marketing
Fax Marketing | SMS Marketing | AutoResponder Marketing