Using Facebook For Business Right
So, you’re dabbling in this Facebook thing for your business and learning as you go. Probably wondering exactly what goes where and what you should do. Here are a couple of the basics of using Facebook for business.
Profiles and Pages
The first thing to get right is putting your business in the right place. Facebook profiles are for you personally, Facebook pages are for business. If you are using your personal profile (the account in your personal name) to post business information, you are using Facebook wrong and are violating Facebook rules. You could actually have your personal profile shut down. Now you might think that you’re not doing that, but if you have a Twitter account and are posting your tweets simultaneously to your Facebook profile, you probably are posting business stuff. I see this happening quite a bit with realtors, solo entrepreneurs, and both marketing and social media consultants (who really should know better).
The remedy is to create a Facebook business page in addition to your personal profile. It’s a simple process and you can do it here: Facebook Business Pages. Once you set up your new business page you can talk business all you want. But you won’t have anybody listening because it’s a brand new page. Now it’s ok to go back to your personal profile and say: "I’m keeping my profile personal, but let’s talk business over at my new Facebook Business page" and then post a link to your new page. Afterward, it’s ok to occasionally post a status update in your personal profile that says, "Remember, I keep things personal here and discuss business over on my page."
Getting Facebook Page Fans
Facebook also allows you suggest your page to your personal profile friends. Beneath your profile picture on your business page, look for the link that says suggest to friends. Click on that link and then choose the friends that you want to receive an invitation.
Now it’s time to use your existing web resources to attract new fans to your page. Facebook provides a snippet of code that you can use in the form of the Fan Box Widget. Get the code and paste it on your website home page and your blog.
Business Page Strategy
A few weeks ago, I suggested that your social media strategy starts with a purpose. Decide what you want to accomplish with your business page and then focus your all your status updates with your purpose. As you focus on that purpose, be social with your business postings, don’t just post links and classified-type ads. If you don’t feel that you are a very social person, it may be best for you to not even start a social media program.
Another tactic to gaining business page fans is to tag other Facebook users in your status updates. Tagging other people using Facebook sends them a notice they’ve been tagged, thus prompting them to visit your page. This recently happened to me when Sunny Cervantes tagged me on her The Marketing Girl page. A word of caution, tag people with a purpose, otherwise it will be perceived as spam. Sunny tagged me to engage me in a discussion about the tedious tasks of owning your own business.
And finally, post frequently to your Facebook business page. Once every three days won’t cut it because your status updates will get drowned out. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, meaning you are 1/130th of the status updates in their feed. Facebook feeds are primarily time-sensitive, so most users only see the most recent status updates. If you truly want to use your business page as a marketing tool, then you must post frequently to be seen. I suggest three to four times a day, during different times of the day.
Do you have a Facebook business page? Are you using Facebook right?
Continue reading here: Twitter for Local Business: Tools for Finding Followers
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