By: Michael Sim
Facebook Overview
1) Profile Content
Content is king with all social media websites. With Facebook, filling out your company or personal profile with as much quality information as possible will result in better visibility through relevant keyword searches. Also, be sure to include links to your company website, blog, and other social networks wherever possible. Your profile image is also a very important element to consider. Make sure you have a picture that doesn’t give people the impression that you are anything less than a professional. The biggest issue that most people have with Facebook is the conflict that arises from diluting a network built with friends and family with business contacts. If you would like to maintain separation between your personal connections and professional, simply create a new profile. However, if you are using your personal account to do business, it is best to remove as much material as possible that would lower your chances of appearing like a trustworthy professional.
2) Friend-Adding
Friend-adding is Facebook’s way of allowing users to add people to their networks. Adding a friend works much like Twitter’s follower feature. Friends are able to view your updates in their public timeline, and are also given many more interactive options than Twitter. A general rule of thumb is to add around 30 friends per day, and try to make a quality connection with most of them. Identify common interests with your new friends, provide feedback on updates they’ve made, and present them with advice and assistance. By building a strong presence for yourself and your company through a demonstration of kindness, interest, assistance, and expertise, you are ultimately creating a network of people who will praise your brand. Since social networking is heavily based on word-of-mouth referral marketing, making a good impression can have a significant impact on lead generation.
3) Wall Posts
Wall posts enable users to post public messages and comments to individual users. Wall posts are not only visible to the individual, but also all of the friends of that specific user. Wall posts tend to turn into conversations, which have a very high viral marketing value. Companies can take advantage of using wall posts to create or continue existing conversations from within their friends’ profiles. It also presents the opportunity to refer people to your company website whenever it is relevant to the conversation.
4) Status Updates
Status updates are visible in the public timeline (wall) of all your friends. Each update displays individually in a public timeline, and each friend of that specific friend has the ability to comment or interact with that update. Status updates are the most powerful means of creating highly valuable conversations within your network of friends.
5) Groups
Facebook’s Groups feature is another tool that can have a significant impact on its marketing value. Inviting people to become a member of your group is usually non-threatening. This allows you to generate a significantly larger group of individuals as compared to a standard website capture page. Groups create the perfect environment for establishing your company’s presence, expertise, knowledge-base, and services/products. Groups also feature bulk-emailing to your group members, which can be used to send updates, invitations to events, coupons or discounts, and more. It is also possible to set-up your groups page with affiliate advertisements or products, from which you could then create affiliate commission. It is also a great way to interact with a large amount of people without violating Facebook’s terms of services.
6) Connect With Your Leads
When making a contact with a lead, encourage them to view your profile or company page on Facebook. Becoming someone’s friend or follower within any social environment is one of the strongest forms of opt-in marketing available.
7) Notes
The notes feature within Facebook serves as a custom call-out posting utility. Creating a new note allows you to create a customized message that appears on your profile sidebar. By using this area to post links, photos, and other important information, you are adding a customized touch to your pages that provides your viewers with the added convenience of connecting with your company information. When a new note is created, it is also posted as an update in your public activity stream.
8) Contact Importer
The contact importer helps you connect with people that you have made contact with via several email platforms. By uploading your contacts from AIM, Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail, a message will be sent to your new contacts inviting them to add you to their friends list.
9) Photo Tagging
Photo tagging is a feature that allows you to select a region on a photograph, and assign it to a specific person (or people) within your friends list. This originally was intended to allow you to tag pictures of people, and link to the people that were included in the photo. When a person is tagged in a photo, (regardless if they are actually in that photo or not), the image appears within their “Photos” section along with a status update alerting the person that they have been tagged in a photo. This feature can be used to send out personalized image-based invitations, coupons, greeting cards, and so on. Be careful however, overdoing it with photo-tagging can have negative consequences if your friends view this as a spamming technique.
10) Facebook Badge
Facebook’s badge feature allows users to embed a small widget of profile information on other websites. This increases the visibility of your company by connecting your website or blog viewers to your Facebook profile page.
URL: http://facebook.com/facebook-widgets/
11) Messages
Facebook’s default settings include a standard messaging system that allows users to send secure, private messages to friends. When sending a new message, you also have the ability to mass-distribute your message to contacts within your friends list. This can be a highly marketable feature if used to update existing clients, or to send out a generalized marketing message to a select group of prospects.
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