Social media is quickly becoming the juggernaut of interpersonal and business communication. Facebook now boasts over 1 billion users and the site sees over 600 million unique visitors a month.

While Facebook is obviously the dominant player in the market, Twitter currently reports 165 million users, and Foursquare has a community of over 30 million. Even the social media dinosaur MySpace still boasts over 20 million active users.

The key to social media marketing is audience. If you don’t have an audience, the best designed marketing plan is worthless. In social media, the audience is your followers. On Facebook, your followers are the people that have liked your Facebook brand page.

Become a Likeable Facebook Brand

Building “Likes” is something that every brand should focused on consistently. There are two keys to building your Facebook following: in-store promotion and solid content marketing.

The following tips apply to Facebook marketing, but most of these techniques can be applied to other social media platforms as well.

In-Store Promotion

The best time to get a customer to “Like” your Facebook page is while they are in your physical store or shopping your e-commerce site.

• Firstly, you know that this person is your ideal audience; after all, they have already shown interest in your business.
• Secondly, you can ask them. People don’t like to say no to others and when you are asking them to engage in a no-cost activity you are likely to get a yes. You are even more likely to get a yes if you incentivize them to do so.

For example, if you own a brick and mortar retail space, the majority of your customers walk in with a computer in their pocket. They have the ability to pull out their smart phone and like your page right there, at checkout.

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Recommendation: Ask every paying customer to Like your page on Facebook by giving them an incentive to do so.

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The incentive can include a discount on the current purchase, a free membership, or whatever giveaway makes sense for your business. The key is to give them the incentive to like you right away. Here’s an example scenario:

Sales Associate: “Your total is $42.99. Have you liked us yet on Facebook?”
Customer: “No, I haven’t seen your page.”
Sales Associate: “Well, if you like us on Facebook on your phone right now, I can take 10% off this order.”
Customer: “Great.”

The customer then pulls out thier smartphone, shows the associate that they have liked the store’s Facebook page, and the associate takes 10% off the order. Consider how many transactions you conduct on a weekly basis. For most retail stores that equates to 100-1,000 transactions per week.

Content Marketing

What is good content?  Great content is information that your Facebook fans want to read and share. If you can get your Facebook fans to consistently share your content, your fan base will grow exponentially.