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.

Why be on Facebook?

Facebook is the 4th most popular website in the United States.  As a business owner, you need to understand it.  There are more than 175 million active users on Facebook – and it is not just for kids anymore.  In fact more than 1/2 of Facebooks users are outside of college, with the fastest growing demographic being those over 30 years of age.  What do those big numbers mean?  600,000 new users every day.  I live in a small town of 14,000 people outside of Minneapolis – we have over 7,000 Facebook users!  (These numbers are based on advertising demographics from Facebook.)

Did you know

• The average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 4 million users become fans of Pages each day (why shouldn’t they become a fan of your business?)
• If Facebook were a country, it would now be the 8th most populous in the world.

To grow your business, how can you not be part of Facebook?  Chances are very good that your customers are on Facebook.

How some organizations and businesses are using Facebook?

• Local coffee shops use Facebook to promote events and specials directly to teens in the area
• Youth Pastors are going to where the youth are – on Facebook – rather than making teens come to them (and they are starting powerful conversations)
• Businesses are building discussions around services and how they can improve
• Non-Smoking initiatives are building a community around their mission
• Retail stores are promoting new products to their Facebook followers first – creating an exclusive community of passionate customers
• Do you have other ideas?  Here is a list of the The 30 Most Popular Pages on Facebook.

There is a strategy for your business to use Facebook to connect with your customers or potential customers.  The key word here is STRATEGY.  Without a strategy, you just have another marketing tool to maintain with no results.  Out of all of the social sites we are going to talk about, it is CRITICAL that you understand Facebook.   Even if you only use it for personal use, it is a platform that many other social sites are based on.  We will talk about how other sites such as video sharing, photo sharing, and blogs can be integrated into your Facebook page.  For now, lets get back to the basics.

ACTION ITEM ONE:  Facebook is an exciting way to promote your business, but first you need to establish an account and get your personal page set up. This requires an email address, but is very simple to do. Go to www.facebook.com and follow the steps. Once you have your page, make sure you go into each of your settings (upper right corner) and set your desired level of privacy.   All Facebook pages default to a public listing and anyone will be able to access your personal page and information. The least restrictive is “Everyone”, and the most restrictive is “Friends Only.”  One of the reasons Facebook is so popular is that it can be very secure.  Your personal page is different from a business page.  So for right now, focus on creating your personal page.