According to  Mashable, there are over 56 million women using Facebook in the United States.  “For marketers this means one very important thing,” Brette Borow, the president and founder of Girls Guide To, the “ladies only” guide to life, wrote for Mashable. “If you have a brand, product or company that targets women, Facebook is the place to be. Unfortunately, unless you’re a brand that every woman knows or loves, then just being on Facebook is not enough.”

Brette offers these 10 tips for marketing to women on Facebook:

1- Quality counts
2- Create an emotional connection
3- Provide Utility
4- Give fans a voice
5- Listen
6- Complement her life, don’t complicate it.
7- Don’t be redundant
8- Keep the shopping seamless
9- Remember: she’s a social shopper
10- Keep your fans in the loop

Women’s clothing designer and online retailer Hayden Harnett have done an impressive job of building and maintaining a loyal fan base for their gorgeous products. For more then two years this team honed these tips Brette recommends and then some with their transparent, customer engaging, social networking, with no sales pitches.  My favorite is the stories and photos that customers share of their purchases. The entire product line is given proper names making it easy to personalize and have fun while creating a connection between the company and your wardrobe. If you want to find out more visit the Hayden-Harnett website, Twitter and Facebook.

Have tips or experiences for marketing to women online let us know, we would all love to hear them.

Sometimes the simplest ideas and smallest budgets create big things. In August 2009 creative agency Forsman & Bodenfors devised a Facebook campaign strategy to launch a new IKEA store in Malmö Sweden. The objective was to also promote IKEA beyond Malmö. The agency created a personal profile page for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson. Over a 2 week period 12 showroom images were uploaded to his photo album. The engagement with audiences started with a simple contest – the person who tagged their name on the products in the pictures first, won it. Of course once word got out (went viral) the demand for more IKEA pictures quickly grew. The pictures spread to thousands of people via profile pages, newsfeeds and links.

Instead of using a boring banner ad, IKEA engaged audiences and they became the advocates in promoting IKEA. This was all achieved by simply using Facebooks existing features of photo albums and tagging. The simplicity of this campaign strategy also makes you realize that social media reinforces the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

What ideas does this inspire in you to create engagement and fun with your audiences to promote your business?