Is it not better to fiend your own friends and try to find people who have the same interests as you?
facebook is really good for marketing and increasing your sells. The key is knowing how to approach it. I agree with mostly with what everyone else has said, except for the "fan page". If your in a very competitive field, it's far to easy for your competitors to look and see who your fans are. For my company the facebook page is normal cant see our friends unless you are one. The key is to use facebook, just like you would use your newsletter's. Post any new products or sell items to facebook. Once you get your friends list on facebook built up with tageted friends that actually want what your selling; you'll see the sell's start coming in.
i dunno how to get targeted visitor on facebook but i do now how to add more friends in short time. go into fb and play game everyday like mafia war or sorority life then pimp yourself to get more mafia family or sorority sisters. me and my bf add more than 500 friends in less than 1 month because everybody need to add more member to proceed with the games. i dunno does this help in doing marketing in the future. it's not targeted but at least we have many friends there.
Play games to get more friends? That is interesting but I really think I need targeted traffic and just many friends who don't find my product interesting is of no need for me.
Facebook and twitter can both be quite useful ways to share latest news and gauge feedback on products, etc. However, I don't think people on Facebook are using it in quite the same commercial way as they use Google for example. facebook is their hobbiest stuff - Google is for buying flights and researching purchases...
getting people to become fans is the hardest problem i'm currently having... i've read so many reports/forums where people make thousands off their FB fan page but the majority recur to email harvesting and spamming... I'm trying to avoid that route and see if i can get it to grow organically.. not an easy task so far.
She has a point . . . those games are huge. But even better, I think, would be to try and get in as one of *their* merchant affiliates and be one of the companies with offers that grant them credits for use in the games.
The reason so many people fail with facebook is because they think they can launch a huge group with just the friends in their personal account, it takes 100k to launch groups that are guaranteed to get the number one spot after a day or two. Having 50k - 100k friends is a good way to guarantee success when promoting on Facebook...
many sells facebook fan pages but it is against the TOS and the good way to get the fan of particular niche is to create a blog on particular topic which will attract people of that niche and you should add facebook fan page widget in your blog, to get fans directly from your blog
I had this idea a little while back. You're right - you can VERY easily get hundreds of FB friends very quickly through Mafia Wars adding. I once sent a request to fan a page to about 600 people and only 15 or so did it, so expect this to be a very tough way to market something. Also keep in mind that when people add friends for Mafia Wars/Farmville/anything else, they usually put you in a folder that restricts you from seeing their profile, and they might also hide your updates on their live feed page.
yes markn you are right, adding friends from mafia wars or farmville may not be useful to facebook marketing