I have often written that your social media marketing has to focus on the needs of the audience first. However this recent article by Clay MacDaniel cites research by Razorfish and She’sConnected.com are indicating that a primary reason for consumers to fan your company or brand is to receive promotions and discounts. Let’s take a look at some ways that you can find a balance between social media marketing that attracts the attentions of your audience and social media marketing that pushes sales messages to them.

For a short while this past week, there was an accidentally revealed document floating around the web that shows some potential upcoming developments in facebook marketing…and they are definitely ideas that will make business page owners very happy. The document itself is no longer anywhere where I can link to it but there is this useful article about it on the Inside Facebook site. Here’s the high points:

I am generally in favor of Facebook business pages as long as the business has a reasonably interesting content strategy, the willingness to committ sustained time and energy to it, and the willingness to cross-promote it in througout their marketing efforts. However, there is one thing thaty bugs me about Facebook relative to some of the other popular social sites such as Twitter and YouTube. On Facebook there is no way to search for and engage potential new fans without using Facebook advertising to get to them. I know Facebook does not want to commit the same sins as MySpace and create a platform for spammers but I have to believe that there can be a way to implement fan site invitations that would not be intrusive.

There is a commitment involved in operating a business page on Facebook. Companies who are not prepared to support the effort with content and conversation should think twice before launching it. However, for those who are prepared to invest the energy, Facebook can be a great platform with useful tools for building out a fan base and optimizing your approach. Carnet Williams wrote this great article with 10 tips for Facebook fan pages. Here are some of the highlights:

Facebook’s Social Ads Platform publishes statistics on the demographics of its audience for the sake of people looking to use their ad platform. I’ve embedded the full spreadsheet of data below but the surprising thing that jumps out is that the young users are declining at a rate of almost 20%. Some theories as to why this is so include:

With more and more of our devices able to take good quality pictures and send them to various places online, it is interesting to note that Facebook has created the capability to email photos directly to your account. Here are some simple steps to follow to take advantage of this:

It came as a surprise to me and I would think it would be a surprise to many of us that Facebook defaults to allowing your photo to appear dynamically in ads that run on their site. That’s right, you might be appearing in an ad right now and you would not know it. Who thought that would be a good idea and why did the person arguing the point with them not win? I’ll tell you how to opt-out but I have to share a funny story first.

According to a study by Borrell Associates, Facebook will receive over $500 million this year in advertising revenue with over 74% of that revenue derived from local businesses using Facebook to target users geographically. Click here for more information but Borrell is quick to note that despite the striking focus on local advertising on Facebook that the overall numbers still represent only a a tiny fraction of the overall dollars spent on local advertising. However what interests me is not the overall percentage of local advertising budgets that is going to social networks but rather the speed with which any percentage at all has gone to them and the fact the Facebook is the preferred choice.

If you have a business facebook account and you are looking for the best ways to leverage it you should look into Facebook fan boxes. They are a simple to install and configure widget that you can place in your own website to create a dynamically updating version of the fan activity on your facebook page. OK that sounds geeky and intimidating but here is a picture of what it does.

Scott Monty from Ford Motors calls our attention to the age demographics of users on Facebook in this article. The highlight that is perhaps the surprise to some is that the fastest growing demographics are in the age ranges 35 and up. Substantial growth has been seen in woman over 55. Check out the chart below: