Facebook recently launched the capabilities of replying to comments via email. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a message from Facebook in each of the emails that reads, “New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this post.” This is a fantastic feature for anyone who manages a fan page. Manage multiple fan pages as I do, and it is a gift. Today, I’m referring to it as my special holiday gift from Facebook.

I’ve always monitored comments via email. My email feeds into my Blackberry. Now, I can reply faster and easier to keep discussions going and without logging into Facebook. This saves me a ton of steps, not to mention a whole lot of time. Thanks Facebook!

*Hint: Don’t try to reply to emailed messages from last week. The feature wasn’t implemented and is likely not to work on older messages.

In order to proceed, you must have a personal Facebook page, and we strongly recommend that you are familiar with some of the basic features of the application.  That was the purpose of yesterday.  Now, let’s get started with a business page. We want to make this effort as easy and effective as possible.

You have two free options on Facebook. You can create a Group or a Page for your business. We recommend building a Page, and here’s why. Pages were designed to accommodate viral marketing. Viral marketing is a method of spreading word of your product or service rapidly from one person to another. For business, this is a good thing.

Pages slowly (or quickly in some cases) acquire Fans.  Aretha Franklins’ Hat page acquired 70,000 fans in two days!   People can visit your page or join your page as a Fan. (You don’t have to worry about managing “friends” in Pages.) If they do this, it shows up on each of their Facebook profiles that they are a Fan of your business.

A picture (of your choosing) and a link to your Page shows up in the news feeds of all their friends. Their friend, in turn, will hopefully visit and become Fans.  How cool is this?  Your page can also intregrate your blog posts, YouTube videos, and more!  Take a look at the Facebook page Vivid Image just setup.  We included photos, videos and events.  Become a FAN!

START HERE – ACTION ITEM ONE:  Facebook for Business Overview, Features, and Specifications(3.9 mb PDF)

There’s so much more you can do with Facebook. Before we dive into more ideas, work on this ACTION ITEM: Build a Page for your Business. Focus on valuable content, and put it into your schedule to review and revise it everyday. View this page as a learning tool, and remember, you can always delete it later once you have a “Great Big Awesome Idea” you want to try!

Other Reading Material:

• Using Facebook in Your Nonprofit
  “Social networking platforms give nonprofits a forum for meeting like-minded organizations and potential supporters, and provide a medium for spreading their messages beyond the immediate community,” says Alan Rosenblatt
• Facebook Pages Will Replace Traditional Landing Pages
   A landing page is “the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.”  This post explains some of the opportunities businesses have by using Facebook pages as a landing page.
• 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook 
  Here are over 30 Facebook applications to help promote, network, communicate, collaborate and accomplish more with your business.