How to leverage Facebook for business

Dec 22, 2010 by Unbeatable Machines    No Comments    Posted under: seo, social media

Facebook is the the largest social media site on the web right now, with over 500 million users, a powerful API, social integration with external sites, and a variety of business friendly features. Most businesses however don’t utilize Facebook properly, or to the potential they could. If your business is new to Facebook then your are going to want to know how to leverage Facebook for your business.

The first step is to get a fan page up and running. You can modify the page with custom landing pages using HTML just as you would build a normal site. This part however is optional. What is mandatory is having a fan page and posting to it at least weekly. Your posts should be relevant to your business, and your fans.

Next you will want to integrate your site to some degree with Facebook, even if it is just a button linking to your fan page. This allows you to leverage your existing clients, getting them onto your fan page and allowing for constant contact with them. After you have a fan page and relevant links back to it you will want to write about your business on your page’s info tab.

Once you have some information about your business and a decent amount of interesting content you will want to start building your fan base. To do this think about what groups on Facebook you interact with, and what made you join them. This will help you get into the mindset to drive organic growth. If your site has a good SEO strategy in place Facebook can be used for additional back links.

From this point you may want to look at making a targeted Facebook ad. Think about the demographic you would like to target, the geographic area of your advertisement, and other relevant info when making and targeting the ad toward certain people. Does your ad appeal to only one age group? What about separate ads for different age groups? Think about targeting your ads toward fans of groups your products are relevant to. Once they click on that ad are they going to become a fan of your page? If not why not? Try focusing the content you post on the demographic you are trying to attract. This article just scratches the surface on how to leverage Facebook for business, in later articles we will discuss other features of Facebook including groups, events, Facebook connect, and using social media to respond to customer feedback so subscribe to our RSS feed, Twitter, or Facebook page.