Leverage new Facebook and Bing features for marketing your business

On December 15, 2010 Bing announced major updates to Bing search, centered around richer Facebook integration and visually organized experience. For a business, the feature of most interest is how your company’s Facebook presence influences organic search engine ranking.

When the partnership with Facebook  was launched in October 2010, your ranking in organic search results was not impacted. The only new feature was that  if you search for a keyword  and one of your friends on Facebook has liked one of the articles that shows up in the search results, you will see their picture next to that result.

Now Bing has tweaked its algorithm. When you search a keyword, Bing finds out  what your Facebook  friends are interested in, finds stories they have liked via little “Like” buttons all over the net, and then inserts that into the top results — even if that link would not have appeared in SERP. This feature is currently only available in the US.

Bing now has 11.8 percent of the U.S. search market, a 48% hump growth since Bing replaced Live search in the summer of 2009. Businesses can no longer look at facebook as a fad for youngsters and Bing as a fringe player. You can boost your internet marketing efforts with an compelling facebook page for your business and integrate it with your SEO efforts.

You can create a Facebook page for a company, or for a specific brand or product offered by the business. You need to make the page interesting for your potential customers, to motivate them to “like” your page and share it with friends. If you achieve that, you now an audience whose permission you have to send them relevant messages about your product. You can engage with them and find out what they love and hate about their product use experience.

Interruption marketing – print ads, TV ads, direct mailers, spam emails – no longer work, however outrageous or interesting the advertisement may be. Permission marketing is about engaging the consumer in your marketing campaign by seeking permission to send your communication or get her attention. Today, the busy, harried consumer is no longer listening to ads. She sticks to familiar products, the market leaders. If she has a problem to solve, she listens to her peers and friends. That is why a new product must first reach the innovators, those who love to try new products, and talk about it to their friends. If your product category space is already dominated by earlier entrants, you need to create a ‘Purple Cow’, a remarkable product, and let it loose on the social media sites.

Seven Steps to Market your Product on Facebook