Business Using Social Media: Facebook
Posted by Jason Rudland on Tue, May 04, 2010 @ 04:59 AM
Social media has a buzz around it in the UK right now, but still many businesses don't know how to use one of the main players: Facebook. I've written a guide to Facebook
for business that explains the power of Facebook and how any business in the UK can use it as part of their Internet marketing strategy.
It's useful to know how Facebook organises itself; social networks each have a slightly different way of managing their members, and referring to the associations between them. In Facebook, each individual has a single profile; that is, Facebook
do not want anything other than one profile per living, breathing human being. This means they will delete duplicated profiles, or profiles set up in the name of companies, organisations
or your pet cat. (believe me, people do!)
Facebook's reasoning on this is to protect the integrity of the data they hold on their members. Facebook makes its money from selling advertising based on the demographic (who you are) and psycographic (things you like) profiles they build up. Therefore, if your pet cat, or business is included in that data it somewhat muddies the waters - who knows what books your cat likes to read!
Because Facebook is such a great forum for business, many organisations did setup 'fake' profiles for their business, so Facebook created the concept of a 'Facebook Page', that can be about any charity, pop group, celebrity, or your business.
In the Facebook universe, when two members connect they become 'Facebook friends', but this doesn't really work with non-human relationships. That is, you can be a friend of a business or charity, but they can't exactly be a friend of you. So to distinguish a slightly different relationship Facebook originally called this being a 'Fan' but have recently renamed it as 'Like'. So you can be said to 'like' a range of Facebook pages.
Now we understand how Facebook is organised and what the relationships are called, let's address the big question: how do I use Facebook for my business?
The first thing to do is to set up a Facebook business page. It's quite simple to do, and completely free. the only pre-requisite is you have a Facebook profile yourself. You will be asked a series of questions in the set up, like the name of your page and a description. It's a good idea to have these prepared before you start.
The next step is to flesh out your page with as much remarkable, interesting information for the people you want to 'like' your page as possible. This can be pictures, links to your blogs or articles, company events - you get the idea.
Finally, and crucially you need to give your audience a reason to 'like' you. This may be a special offer, or a fan-only download. For example 10% off if you become a fan, or a 'how to...' downloadable document. For the fan-only downloads you need to be a bit of a computer-wizz, so you will need to recruit your web designer or contact GMIG if you need a little help.
Now you are all set to build your audience in Facebook, by regularly publishing updates of remarkable, interesting information. One good idea is to setup a service to automatically post your blog titles (with a link) to your Facebook page - there are many services like ping.fm that will easily set this up.
As you start to publish information on your page it will catch the eye of the larger Facebook audience and the ones that are interested in what you have to say will 'like' your page. This means that each time you publish information on your page they will be notified - you will become a valuable resource of information for them, so when you promote a special offer (keep the free information to special offer ratio to 10:1) when they are ready they will bite!
Facebook pages are an excellent method of nurturing potential clients who are not ready to buy just yet, into actual paying clients - a client incubator!
