This is a guest post by Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon (http://twitter.com/ryanspoon)), a principal at Polaris Ventures (http://www.polarisventures.com/). Read more about Ryan on his blog at ryanspoon.com (http://www.ryanspoon.com/).
Having already covered how startups can use search (http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/21/startupseo/) and Twitter (http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/14/5-steps-for-startups-to-grow-their-brands-on-twitter/) to find customers, here's 10 steps for finding people on another key marketing platform: Facebook
Facebook has evolved from a social network into the fabric with which much of the web is constructed: identity, product, data, experience and so on. Even if you chose to no longer use it as a social destination, you would still find immense value in it through your every-day web usage: registration, personalization, sharing, interaction, etc.
This is of course a huge opportunity for consumer-focused startups. Facebook plays a core role in touching each step along the standard product / user funnel:
- Acquisition: virality, referrals, paid traffic
- Activation: conversion paths from new to active users
- Activity: user engagement and retention
Below is a slide presentation with five ways to think about leveraging Facebook to affect those three steps on your web experience. Tomorrow I will share five ways to find success on Facebook.com.
TechCrunch