What about Facebook?

What about Facebook?

Facebook originally started as a college network in the U.S. You had to have an

American university email address to join. Since opening its doors to everyone

in 2006, the demographic has rapidly aged and, in common with many social

networks, the fastest-growing age group is people over the age of 35. Don’t

dismiss it as being for kids. Facebook has become one of the most widely used

online marketing tools for business.

Why Facebook works for business

Alongside the usual personal profiles you would expect, Facebook offers a wide

variety of tools such as pages, groups, events, applications, and ads. Because it

has such a large user base, you will almost certainly find a community of interest

on Facebook, however niche your area. You can reach very specific, targeted

users for little cost with “social ads.” But the best thing is it’s completely free to

create a page or group specifically for your business or product, and your target

market will find it. A Facebook page is the single most important thing you can

do on Facebook and one of the easiest. There are more than 160 million pages,

groups and events on Facebook, and the average user is connected to 60 of them.

Your customers are on Facebook—so you need to be.

“your customers are on Facebook. 

In this section, we will look at the steps you need to take to get up to speed with

Facebook.

1. Create your profile.

2. Create a page or group to build a community around your business.

3. Create an event to promote your business.

4. Set up a social ad to target your niche.

Optionally, you might also want to sell products using Facebook Marketplace

(http://apps.facebook.com/marketplace).

Create your profile

If you are not yet on Facebook, the first step is to create a profile. That’s the easy

part: just sign up for an account and enter some information about yourself. You

may not use your own personal profile to promote your business unless you are

the brand or very tied to the business, such as a consultant or musician, but you

will need to have one in order to create groups, pages, or events. Events can also

be created by pages and groups.

1. If you don’t have a personal profile, go to www.facebook.com and create

one now.

2. Enter as much or as little personal information as you want in the fields

provided on the Info tab, but you should always include your business

website in the weblinks field. You can include multiple web addresses if

you want—though too many may confuse people.

3. Be sure to add a profile picture so people know it’s you.

4. The most important place to enter some information about yourself is in

the small box beneath your profile image. This is likely to be the first thing

that people read. You can enter 250 characters here, and it should be your

“elevator pitch”—a short, succinct articulation of what you do and the

benefit you offer. Think of it as the online equivalent of introducing

yourself to someone at a real-life business networking event as you hand

them your business card. There is an “Information” box beneath this. Click

on the pencil icon (top-right) to edit which of the information from your

Info tab appears here. At a minimum you should include your web address

so that anyone intrigued enough by your elevator pitch can click straight

through to your business website. If you don’t yet have a website or blog,

you can enter the Web address for another social network that you’re on, or

for your Twitter page.

5. Spend a bit of time getting your profile right before you start adding

friends, but don’t spend too much time on this beyond the basics—we will

quickly be moving on to pages, groups, and events.

6. Do a search for your topic area and join a few groups and become a fan of

(or “Like”) a few pages. This will help familiarize yourself with the

possibilities, and give you some places where you can post messages and

make more connections (though don’t just spam groups with your

marketing message!)

You can make your profile as visible or invisible as you like to whoever you

choose using the privacy settings. If you are using your personal profile to

develop new contacts and get business, you will probably want most people to

be able to see it. But even if you choose a high level of privacy, you can still

connect with as many people as you want on Facebook via a more public page.

Create a page or group

Groups and pages offer you a way of creating a fully opted-in mailing list: your

members and fans have sought you out and chosen to join your group or become

a fan of your page, making this the ultimate in permission-based marketing. You

can have as many members or fans as you like, where profiles are limited to

5,000 friends. And, like profiles, pages and groups allow status updates, which

show up in the news feeds of your fans or members. There are also differences

between them, which are worth considering when planning your strategy.

Page or group?

Whether you choose a page or a group to promote your business—or both—be

careful about your choice of name. In most cases this is likely to be your

business name. But you could also go for a topic-based name. Either way, it

helps to consider the name of your group or page as carefully as you would a

domain name since people will search for you by keywords on Facebook.

Create a group

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/groups/create.php.

2. Enter a name and description for your group and choose the most

appropriate category from the drop-down menu. All these things will help

people find your group, so think carefully about your group name and,

where possible, include the search terms you expect people to use.

3. Include the other details requested, especially website, and click Create

Group.

4. Continue customizing your group as you wish.

Create a page

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php or scroll to the bottom

of any Facebook page and click the “Create a Page for My Business” link.

2. Choose whichever radio button applies to you: “Local business,” “Brand,

product or organization” or “Artist, band or public figure.” There are

additional subcategories to choose from in a drop-down menu that will

appear.

3. Give your page a name, click the “Create official Page” button, and

continue customizing.

4. Unlike groups, you can install most of the same applications. 

Simplest win: Create your own Facebook application

The more adventurous way to benefit from Facebook applications is to create your own. You will need

some programming skills, or hire a developer, to create a bespoke application with lots of functionality

that people can add to their own profiles. However, there is a simpler way to do it yourself.

There are several applications on Facebook that enable you to create a box on your profile or page that

contains whatever HTML you want. These applications include

• My HTML.

• HTML Profile Box. This can only be used on your profile.

• Static FBML (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4949752878). FBML stands for

“Facebook Markup Language”—but normal HTML works just fine too. This can be used on pages,

and is my favorite because you can add as many boxes as you want to your page using this one

application. You can also create a bespoke tab on your page.

If you or someone you know knows some basic HTML, that’s great. But the main thing I would suggest

is using your own customized HTML box for an email newsletter sign-up form and you can do that

without any coding knowledge. If you set up your email marketing in Chapter 

5, you should have a

piece of code supplied by your email newsletter service provider. Simply paste the code into one of the

Facebook HTML apps. If you don’t yet have your email marketing set up but have a blog, you could

include links to subscribe to your blog by RSS or email instead.

The other app to consider is 

Application Builder (http://apps.facebook.com/applicationbuilder). This

allows you to create one of 13 different types of apps, such as gifts, quizzes, polls, and a fan page

application that can be used to promote your page.

Five ways to win with Facebook pages

1. Claim your username. Once you have 25 fans, you claim your own. 

“vanity URL” instead of meaningless numbers. The Facebook page for this

book is www.facebook.com/getuptospeed, for example. Claim yours at

www.facebook.com/username.

2. Import your blog. The Notes app is the easiest way to do this and keeps

your page fresh.

3. Integrate with Twitter. You can import your Twitter status to your

Facebook page status selectively using the Selective Tweet Status app. You

can also export your page status to Twitter using the Facebook Page to

Twitter app at www.facebook.com/twitter.

4. Create a landing tab. Use the Static FBML app to create a bespoke tab

for your page. Then edit your wall settings on your “edit page” screen to

select the tab you want non-fans to land on. By doing this you can decide

what people see before they become a fan and tempt them in with

compelling content.

5. Promote your page. Now that you’ve created a page let people know

about it: blog about it, tweet about it and include it in your email signature.

A great way to encourage people to “like” your page direct from your blog

or website is with a “Like” button. Find this, and other “social plugins” at

http://developers.facebook.com/plugins.

Create an event

Events are useful for product launches, conferences, seminars, etc., especially

when you have many potential attendees as fans of your page or members of

your group.

Events can be created by:

1. Individuals/profiles http://www.facebook.com/events/create.php.

2. Groups click on the Create group event link below your logo/image.

3. Pages click on the Edit Page link underneath your logo/image, then on

the Edit link underneath Events.