Have you joined the Facebook revolution? According to socialnomics.net, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. It continues to attract large numbers of baby boomers, and that would be a big part of the readership of this newsletter. Here are some reasons to join if you haven’t already or to expand your reach if you are already a member.

1. Your start-up costs are very low. Joining and using Facebook is free, so your only costs involve your time. In the beginning, you’ll spend more time – it’s like anything else new, it has a learning curve. Once you are up-to-speed, you’ll be able to use your time more efficiently.

1. Relationship building is faster. Because you are communicating several times a week or even more often, people get to know you sooner. And, knowing someone leads to liking and trusting them. All marketing is about relationship building, Facebook just lets you get there faster.
2. Your customers are on Facebook (and Twitter). In today’s interactive Web 2.0 world, you have to go to where your customers are. And, it’s not just your customers. You can also find influential people in the industry that you want to connect with, and you can do this on Facebook.
3. You should have a fan page in addition to your personal profile page. Why both? Facebook requires you to start with your personal profile. Personal pages have a limit of 5,000 friends, fan pages do not, so you’ll be able to reach larger numbers of potential customers with a Fan Page. Fan pages also are fully indexed by Google, so that helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
4. Secure a vanity URL for your fan page. This will make it easier for your fans to find you and extends your brand. When I did this for the International Association of Professional Quilters, I wanted to use IAPQ, only to find out the minimum number of characters was five. I ended up using www.facebook.com/IAPQFanClub. This makes it easy to refer people to our Fan page.
5. Be generous and share good content. If you blog – and if you don’t, you should – use the notes application on Facebook to import the blog to your Fan Page automatically. Don’t worry that your Fans already subscribe to your blog or even your e-zine. You never know where they’ll actually read your content. I could share several instances where I wrote something initially in our e-zine, it was posted on the blog and the comments came after an IAPQ member saw the post on Facebook.

Please share your experiences with Facebook below And, if you are interested in learning how to use Facebook to grow your business, join us in our upcoming Social Media Marketing course.

Tags: social media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 15th, 2011 at 8:50 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.