Week 11 - Marketing on Facebook without spending any money

I do believe that you could use Social Media for marketing without paying for it, though the way you would go about it would be different. It will also take you a significant amount of time to implement this, but in the long run, I believe you would be able to build a more effective base than if you used the social media marketing channels.  Here are some ways that I think you could build your base:

• Search out influential companies and people in your industry.  Follow their pages and get them to follow you by building relationships with them. As they learn who you are and begin to trust your work they can begin to share and endorse the work that you do.  By doing this, you will then be respected by the people and companies who respect them. 
• The biggest influence in social media is building relationships. If you spent time building relationships with the people you do have following you, then eventually you could ask that they recommend your business to the people that they know. When their friends see that they endorse you, they will be more likely to trust you and use your services. Then as you build relationship with them, they could also recommend you to their friends, and the growth in your following will be exponential. 
• In order to build these relationships, you will need to come up with content that will benefit your followers, and you will need to interact with them in order to build those relationships. This will take time and lots of effort and creativity to do.

If you are willing to invest your time in these ways, I think you could definitely do this. But time is money, and if you don't have the time to spend doing this, then you should think about paying to do some advertising.  But even if you do, you will still have to spend time investing in the relationships with those people to keep them around. 

For our business, I think it would be a good use to money to initially target specific groups with advertising to kick start the people who follow us.  Without doing this, I think it would take a long time to build that initial base. Then we could use this plan to build out that base by investing in the relationships.