30 Ways to Utilize Facebook for Business

Facebook is not just for finding your friends, keeping people up to date on your status, or daily quizzes! It can also be used as a HIGHLY EFFECTIVE business tool.

It seems that we are still having to convince business owners that tapping into the social media market is not an option anymore, but an absolute necessity. Believe it or not there are still many business owners that do not see any value in facebook, twitter, or the many other social networking platforms available. This is simply due to the lack of understanding and education on the real value that these social media sites have to offer or how they work in general. If used properly facebook can be one of the better inexpensive ways to increase branding, promotion, and awareness of your products/services almost immediately.

I mean do you honestly think that Walmart, Best Buy, Petco, Target, Apple, Sony, and thousands of other corproate giants have facebook pages because they enjoy talking to their old highschool buddies? Come on now, these corporations understand the value and increased exposure they can receive from these gigantic social media sites; and most likely they realized it before you did. Whether you like it or not, social media is not only here to stay, but it will continue to evolve until it takes the place of some other very popular forms of media communication such as traditional email. Thats right! You heard it here first! So if you are one of those stubborn people that do not want to learn new tricks or have another task on your plate, simply hire an affordable freelancer or marketing agency to maintain and update your social media sites for you. It will be well worth it, that is a promise.

It’s great for marketing your products, services, and interacting with your customers to gain valuable feedback in REAL TIME.

I am making a list of 20+ ways Facebook can be a useful tool for your business:

1. Make sure to completely fill out your profile to earn trust. If you have a facebook page or business page then make sure to fill out your profile completely.

2. Create a business fan page if you don’t already have one.

3. Install appropriate applications to integrate feeds from your blog and other social media accounts into your Facebook profile. (If you are reading this on our facebook business page then ITS WORKING! We have our blog synced to facebook so that our blog entries feed to facebook as well as ALL OUR social media accounts)

4. Keep any personal parts of your profile private through Settings. You will have a wide audience (or at least you should if actively participating in facebook) and you do not want to get bothered from anyone but people interested in your business, and you only want your business contact information to be used. You do not want people showing up at your home or calling your cell phone asking when you are going to ship their order or provide them services at ridiculous discounts.

5. Create friends lists such as “Work,” “Family” and “Limited Profile” for finer-grained control over your profile privacy.

6. Post a professional or business casual photos of yourself or business logo to reinforce your brand.

7. Limit business contacts’ access to personal photos.

8. Post your newsletter subscription information and archives somewhere in your business fan page profile. Connect and share this with your connections, fans, and friends.

9. Obtain a Facebook vanity URL so that people can find you easily. You can learn more about this on facebook’s FAQ section.

10. Add your Facebok page URL to your email signature and any marketing collateral (business cards, etc.) so prospects can learn more about you. Make sure you have have a facebook icon on your website that links to your business facebook page.

11. Post business updates on your wall. Focus on business activities, such as “Working with ABC Company on web site redesign.”

12. Share useful articles and links to presentation and valuable resources that interest customers and prospects on your wall, to establish credibility.

13. Combine Facebook with other social media tools like Twitter. For example, when someone asks question on Twitter, you can respond in detail in a blog post and link to it from Facebook.

14. Before traveling, check contacts locations so you can meet with those in the city where you’re heading. Research prospects before meeting or contacting them.

15. Upload your contacts from your email client to get more connections that will spread like wild fire!

16. Use Find Friends for suggestions of other people you may know or be interested in what you have to offer to expand your network even further. Request that they become a fan or a friend and engage with those people.

17. Look for mutual contacts on your contacts’ friends lists.

18. Find experts in your field and invite them as a guest blogger on your blog or speaker at your event.

19. Market your products by posting discounts and package deals. Run some contests and watch people come out of the wood work and participate!

20. Share, survey, or research data to gain credibility.

21. Use Facebook Connect to add social networking features to your web site. You can read more about facebook connect on their website. We will be doing a case study on facebook integration next month in which we will share the pre-results and post-results of the integration.

22. Suggest Friends to clients and colleagues — by helping them, you establish trust.

23. Buy Facebook fans from marketing services to target your exact audience. Think about buying facebook ads as well.

24. Use Network, Group, and Fan Pages to create a large network of followers.

25. Start a group as well as a fan page for product, brand or business.

26. Add basic information to the group or fan page such as links to company site, newsletter subscription information, videos (if you have one), and newsletter archives.

27. Post upcoming events including webinars, conferences, and other programs where you or someone from your company will be present.

28. Update your group or fan page on a regular basis with helpful information and answers to questions. BrazenWebDesign.com has created a method to sync our blog with ping.fm and hootsuite.com to feed all our blog entries from our company site to all social media accounts we own, such as facebook. It requires little work to update all social media sites using this method, but still allows us to engage with people from all social media sites. If you want to know more then please contact us at info@brazenwebdesign.com

29. Join network, industry, and alumni groups related to your business.

30. Use the search function to find groups and fan pages related to your business by industry, location and career.

How do you use Facebook for YOUR business? Do not create a business fan page and then just leave it for dead! Take a little time each week to work on the above suggestions or hire a firm to help you make it easier and less time consuming to update by syncing your blog to facebook, twitter, and other social media platforms!

More to come…