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Eight Pointers on Facebook for Business

Guest post by: William Gissen

Article Overview: Facebook has changed since its introduction as a social network for teenagers. It has been adapted by business executives and added several new features aimed at a corporate audience. Facebook is important because of the sheer number of people involved. As many as 200 million users are registered by Facebook compared to six million with Twitter. Blogs increase by 900,000 posts per day while the combined Facebook/MySpace adds 50 million entries. This article provides eight pointers on becoming involved with Facebook for Business and taking advantage of this huge market.

Eight Pointers on Facebook for Business

Facebook has changed since its introduction as a social network for teenagers. It has been adapted by business executives and added several new features aimed at a corporate audience. Facebook is important because of the sheer number of people involved. As many as 200 million users are registered by Facebook compared to six million with Twitter. Blogs increase by 900,000 posts per day while the combined Facebook/MySpace adds 50 million entries.

Here are eight pointers on becoming involved with Facebook for Business and taking advantage of this huge market.

1. Register with Facebook Pages

Facebook Pages is an entirely unique section of Facebook designed specifically for organizations and business groups. It offers fields regarding your business vision, date of founding, etc. Creating a Facebook Page for your company is an essential first step.

2. Organize your friends

You can organize your Facebook friends into different lists depending on the purpose. An essential first step would involve creating separate lists for personal and business contacts. If you already have a Facebook account, this step will help you to keep it separate from your business.

3. Integrate Facebook with your LinkedIn account

Facebook Pages provides an integration option that lets you create a box to integrate with your LinkedIn account. This helps to create an overall business outpost for serious professionals. LinkedIn, by its work-related focus, also helps to establish a serious background for your Facebook account.

4. Use TweetDeck for sending updates

TweetDeck provides an overall interface that lets you simultaneously monitor and send messages on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This saves enormous amounts of time in maintaining a social media presence.

5. Develop personal relationships

The best marketing occurs when you nurture and develop personal relationships started online. Responding to Facebook messages in a thorough and comprehensive manner is one of the most important things for you to do. There is serious business occurring on Facebook, and you must differentiate yourself from all the dilettantes out there.

6. Join other groups

You can expand your influence on Facebook by joining other groups, fan clubs, etc. After you have established a Facebook presence, you will receive these invitations and should carefully consider them. In order to get people to join you, you must reciprocate. Some of these groups may seem a little flaky, but you must also be willing to humanize your Facebook account, even if the primary focus is professional.

7. Lurk before posting

As people become your friends, and vice versa, you may be tempted to dive in and start an active posting program. It is generally better, however, to absorb the overall culture of your Facebook interactions before becoming involved. This is called "lurking" and follows the general maxim of "look before you leap."

8. Follow a pull model of public relations

In promoting your company, you must be careful not to engage in blatant advertising. This will lead to blocking and dumping by your potential prospects. You should generally follow an 80-20 rule, with only 20 percent of your posts being company-directed. You want to attract, pull, people toward you rather than "pushing out" a message.

These are just some basic tips to start you on the right foot in creating and maintaining a Facebook account for your business. Facebook is more complicated than it might appear at first glance so you want to proceed on a step-by-step basis.

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Article Tags: Facebook for business, Facebook instruction, Facebook Pages



Related Forum Posts
Re: Twitter vs Facebook - I use Facebook pages for Business and rarely ever use Twitter. I hace lost count of the no. of Hotels that I have visited, regarding their marketing campaigns, that may have 5k Facebook Fans and only 100 followers on Twitter. It is a lot more difficult to engage with people on Twitter and thus harder to gain traction. If you are a business like Nike, then Twitter is great, but if you are an SME, then focus on Facebook or LinkedIn (if you are providing a professional service.) You can always have your Facebook feed directly in to Twitter, so you can have a presence on both, but do the work on one. Also check out ping.fm for managing campaigns - it is a free tool, and a great time saver.
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Re: Social media question - Facebook is where I get all my traffic. Facebook is great, because you can create fan pages and your customers come to you. Twitter is good, but I just don't see the same results. I think Facebook is the most popular and it's easier for people to find what they're looking for.
Facebook and Business - While on the Elevator today I read that MySpace and Facebook are surpassing adult-sites in traffic volumes - just thought that was interesting fact. As far as your business is concerned I think that having a Facebook account is viable as long as you keep it business and the most important thing to increase your traffic would be to link up with people well-known in your business-circle. e.g. if your were in the Marketing Business Circle I would link up with people like Dan Kennedy, Mike Filsame, Yanik Silver etc. People linked up with them will now start pouring into your content.
Re: Facebook Advertising? - Facebook has more than 700 million active users and half of them log in on a daily basis. Through Facebook advertising, you can be sure to reach any particular segment. Conventional advertising models are expensive and difficult to reach a narrow target. Facebook advertising is one option that can get you results and target specific user groups. You may be the local beauty parlor, restaurant or a Fortune 500 organization, but eBizUniverse will show how to build your brand equity through Facebook advertising. Consider these ideal scenarios: You own a restaurant and wish to target those who are recently engaged to be married for their catering business. All you need to do is to find the women with the relationship status of “engaged” on Facebook and you have your desired segment with Facebook Ads. (See Sample Ads Below) There is a birthday special that your restaurant is offering and the Facebook Ads would be displayed only to those whose birthdays are in the offing. An event is being organized and you wish to target local college graduates, who are single and 25-35 years old. They are on Facebook and you can reach them with Facebook Ads.


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