Beyond friendship using Facebook for business and how it will improve marketing | Facebook App

Using facebook for business is the current trend in industry to market a product or service. This article covers building a facebook application and describes the ways in using facebook for business. With more than 750 million users it is not wrong to consider facebook as a mini internet. Facebook itself is encouraging people to use their platform to market business. Users are given privilege to market their business by creating a Facebook page, Facebook Application or participating in Facebook advertisement programs (similar to Google Adwords). Facebook page creation is simple. Facebook application development requires some simple steps to integrate other website to facebook. Facebook advertisement program requires an initial payment to promote the product in ads.

Facebook App for website is the best way to use facebook for business. Anyone can use facebook as authorization service for his website, provides a log-in to the site visitor. Facebook will authorize the user and synchronize the facebook profile of the visitor with the site. You can see this in many websites now as Facebook connect; Hubpages itself adapted it in their main page. Thus the activity of the visitor on your site can be easily updated in Facebook activity stream. Activity stream is the news feed which is the heart of every social network now. The authorization can be customized in many ways by which the user will permit your site to access his/her profile. Sample codes to generate this are provided by Facebook itself. They also have a java-script test console to run and experiment the codes (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/console/).

Steps to create a Facebook App

1) Go to this link https://developers.facebook.com/apps

2) Select create new App.

3) Save the App ID and App Secret.

4) Fill the basic info (You can leave the App Namespace).

App Name: Sample

App Domain: Sample.com

5) Now go to the advance fields below

· Website

Provide the site URL: http://sample.com (this page will be loaded when the user complete sign-in with facebook credentials in your site).

· App on Facebook

You can create a facebook canvas page for your app. Canvas page is the home page of the application where the info about the app is described to those who want to use it.

· Mobile Native and Page Tab are optional fields; you can make additional customizations by referring facebook App tutorial (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/canvas/)

The best part in using Facebook for business is it ability’s to target individuals based on large no of variables including age, gender, interests and location. This is a great opportunity to market a product. Facebook is open to display ads of any service. Facebook advertisement program is a paid one. Advertisers are given control of setting the daily or lifetime budget. But the ad program will be costlier than Google Adwords (Adwords will give you an Advertise trial with less dollar fee). The main advantage of Facebook ads is that you can target an active user through online. As in a mini-internet culture there is chance that more people will get targeted through your ad. No need to have a featured content website for advertising, facebook itself provides you many options to customize you app page with FBML scripts. Facebook advertising policy is not similar to traditional ones. Higher ranked keywords could be more costly, a good method is to target large no of keywords which are low ranking, which are less ranking. This keyword group can probably give a large amount of traffic with less invest. To add more fans to your page (3000 fans in 30 days) you have to consider high traffic keywords, so to invest more for ads. Selecting the ads should be based on the business requirement.

Feel free to ask me about the doubts regarding creating a Facebook app or any other development issues while linking Facebook to your website.

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