Facebook Social Networking for Businesses
Why join Facebook?
Facebook allows you to connect with your friends, family, coworkers and, better yet, potential customers! Facebook is a Social Networking site, an online community where people make connections to others who share their interests or who they have met in the offline world. This may surprise you, but through active Social Networking you can build trust around your brand, foster customer loyalty, and give an additional boost to your marketing efforts.
How can Facebook do all that for me?
- Facebook allows people to connect a face with your business. Your website is clearly the biggest piece of your online presence, but while websites supply crucial information about your business and offer your products to the world, they can often seem impersonal to users. With Facebook, you get to connect to and interact with your customer base on a much more personal level and in turn establish a level of trust around your brand that wouldn’t be possible through non-social mediums.
- Facebook allows you to have public discussions with your potential customers. Facebook provides two major ways to have a public dialogue with your customers: Wall commenting and Status commenting.
- Wall commenting: Just go to someone’s profile and leave a comment on their wall. They can comment back on your wall. Repeat. The best part is that all of this is public; if you happen to be answering questions about your services or products, it’s there for all of your friends and their friends to see.
- Status commenting: When someone updates their status, you can comment on that status directly: it’s like responding directly to someone’s thought. Status commenting can be used to facilitate personal connection, but can also allow you to lend a helping hand if you (or your company) can solve a problem your friend is having.
- Facebook can have great marketing power if you share things that your friends are interested in. Nobody likes having spammy friends who make hundreds of status updates and wall comments about their upcoming seminar or new website, so take the time to get to know your friends and engage their interest. When you learn to strike a chord with your friends, you’ll really see improved Facebook marketing results.
Getting started on Facebook
Facebook is for Everyone!
Facebook is for everyone, even you! While the Social Network was originally designed for college students, it’s now opened its arms to people from all ages and all walks of live, even businesses, social causes, and bands. As a result, Facebook has experienced a huge growth in popularity and in June 208 overtook MySpace as the world’s largest social network. Actually, as of this year Facebook has twice as many users as MySpace. So why wait? If you’re not on Facebook already, registering for an account is quick and easy. Fill out your profile and then make some friends!
Finding Friends:
 Finding friends on Facebook is easy. You can search by either name or e-mail address. However, if you’re just getting started on Facebook, there’s a great way to add friends that will save you loads of time: the “Find People You E-Mail” feature! All you have to do is click on the Friends tab at the top of your screen and you’ll see it right away. Just enter your full e-mail address and password (don’t worry, Facebook will not store your e-mail password) and it will automatically send friendship requests to all of the people in your e-mail’s address book.
This useful feature currently supports e-mail addresses at: yahoo.com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, aol.com, msn.com, live.com, comcast.net, sbcglobal.net, and many more. If you’re e-mail address isn’t currently supported, you can always use the “Upload Contact File” option that will let you upload an exported list of all your contact. Just click on the “Upload Contact File” link and you’ll be given great instructions. Once you’ve added friends, you can start using Facebook as a Social Media Marketing tool!
Tips for successful marketing on Facebook:
- Complete Your Profile: Don’t hold back! When people add you on Facebook, it’s because they want to get to know you. If these are your potential customers, that’s exactly what you want so you’d better give it to them! Make sure that your profile is completely filled out, upload pictures, and start participating.
- Be real: Don’t make every status update, wall comment, and shared link a blatant promotion of your business or website. Talk about what interests you and what you feel will interest your friends/fans.
- Be a Part of the Community: When someone takes the time to leave a comment on your wall, reply to them. Comment on statuses. Just interact. People will see that you’re a real person and consequently be more inclined to interact with you; don’t forget that those same people are YOUR potential customers.
- Stay Up To Date: Keep your profile/fan page updated with events, useful resources, and update your status. If possible, update your status once a day so that your friends see an update from you whenever they log in.
Difference between a profile and a fan page
One way that a fan page is different from your profile is that you create a Fan page via your profile: you can’t create a fan page without having a profile first. The second
and most essential difference is that Fan Page has Insights.
"Facebook allows you to engage with your fans in more ways than ever before - and Insights now allows you to dive into the context of those interactions with deep analytics. We now show you how users are interacting with your page, broken down by Wall posts, likes and comments. Your Post Quality shows you how engaging your posts are to your fans, and your star rating compares your Post Quality to other pages of similar size. Your Fans Over Time graph now lets you track when users decide to unsubscribe from your posts in their News Feed. And we now provide statistics on where your fan base is located and which languages they speak. If you would like to export your reports, please click 'Switch to the Old Insights' in the menu above and follow the Export link. Check back frequently, as we will be adding new metrics in the coming weeks and months!"
Create a Facebook fan page here!
Advertising on Facebook:
Facebook ads are CPC ads. That’s Cost Per Click, meaning you don’t pay a cent unless someone actually clicks on your ad. You can also set the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per click!
A neat feature of promoting your Fan Page via a Facebook ad, is that if the user viewing your ad has friends who are already your fans, the ad will let them know that “John Doe is a fan”. That information gives your page more credibility in the eyes of that user because your Fan Page is essentially endorsed by their friend.
Essential Facebook Terminology:
Status: When you login to your Facebook profile, you’ll see a text box that says “What’s on your mind” followed by a blue “Share” button. This is where you can tell the world what you’re up to currently. Are you working on a new project or offering an exciting service? Do you have a interesting online resource you want to share or show off your newly redesigned website? Maybe you just want to let people know how you’re day is going. Anything is game; just remember that what you write will be displayed to all of your friends. You’ll also see all of their “status updates”.
Wall: Walls are where the majority of user interaction occurs on Facebook. Each Facebook user has their own personal wall that displays comments from friends, status updates, shared links, and other recent activity. If you want to see everything that’s happening on Facebook in relation to you, seek out your wall. Conversely, to see everything that’s been going on with a particular person, you can just head over to their wall.
Apps (applications): Apps are web applications that Facebook users can add to their profiles. When you “add” an app, you agree to let it access certain information from your profile, post app-related activity to your wall, and, in many cases, send your friends requests. The point of the majority of apps is to get more and more people to add them. To that end, many apps allow you to do things like “send gifts” to your friends. The only way your friends can accept those gifts, is to add the app to their profile. Additionallly, many apps will also try to get you to send out mass app invitations to your friends when you first ad it. The techniques are a bit sneaky, but essentially harmless. However, while some of your friends don’t mind seeing app requests in their inbox, some may find it annoying.
Friends: For the most part, friends are exactly that: friends. Facebook is great for finding your offline friends online. However, Facebook is also amazing for networking so all your friends may not be “friends” in the strictest sense. You only have friends if you have a personal profile. Fan pages to not have friends; they have fans.
Fans: Fans are the people who decide to follow your Fan Page. They are the equivalent of a personal profile’s friends. You can see which pages people are Fans of by going to their Info tab and looking under “Pages”. If they are fans of any pages, it will list all of them there.
Notes: A note is Facebook’s equivalent of a blog entry. If you have something on your mind, you can share it via a note. When you save a note, an announcement is published to your wall for all your friends to see. Links and/or Sharing a Link: If you find something on the web that you’d like to share with another user, you can post it on their wall. Underneath the text box on their wall, there is a “link” icon. Insert a URL in the appropriate field and write a brief comment explaining why you think it’s something they’d like. You can also share a link on your own wall via your status update area. This will show your link to all your friends just like it was a status update.
Boxes: The boxes section of your profile shows the activity of various applications that you have added; one app’s activity per box. You can control which apps show up here and move them to your main “Wall” section or delete them altogether. Boxes used to have much more visibility in the early days of Facebook, when they were ALL on the same page with your Wall. Back then there were no tabs to separate the information. Now boxes have become relatively antiquated; I mean, who’s going to click on your boxes tab just to see how many “growing gifts” you received this month or what your personal stats are on the Chess app?
Profile: When someone clicks on your picture or name, they are taken to your profile. You can get to your own profile from the blue navigation bar at the top of the screen as well. Your profile is the area that contains all the information about you and within your profile are the Wall, Info, Photos, and Boxes tabs. Home: Home the “Dashboard” of your Facebook account. When you login to your account, your “go home”. From your Home, you can update your status, share links, and see all of your friend’s activity. You can also monitor your friend and app requests as well as see “highlights”; friend activity that Facebook thinks you’ll be interested in.
Fan Pages: Fan Pages is essentially a cross between a Facebook profile and a webiste for a business, band, cause, or organization. You create a Fan Page from your personal profile and people can become a Fan of your page.
Networks: When Facebook began, you had to belong to a college and join that college’s network if you wanted to be on the site. This helped facilitate building connections with other classmates. Now the networks have grown to include geographical areas and workplaces. If you are in the same network as someone and are not yet their friend, you can see more of their profile than someone who isn’t in their network.
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