FB 1: What is Facebook.Com and Why Should you care?

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook.Com is a social networking tool for people to connect friends, families, colleagues allowing them to communicate and interact in a variety of ways.

Since its inception in 2004, Facebook.Com today has over 750 million fans hooked in to its addicting attributes, making it the second most visited website by unique visitors after Google.com

What started as a college community act is now a global agenda spearheading a revolutionary change in the way we interact with the web, giving businesses across the globe a lot to think about utilizing its rich ever-expanding 750 million active subscribers!

Business Goals for Using Facebook.com

Get found by people searching for products or services

Connect & Engage with current and potential customers

Create & Manage with a community around your business

Promote & Distribute with other content you create like a webinar, blog posts, etc

Generate leads for your business

FB 6: Facebook.com Group vs. Pages

Image by Florian SEROUSSI via Flickr

Businesses should create a Facebook.Com Page to represent their brand or company; however creating your Facebook.Com Group has its own benefits and yields responses from a community of people with a common taste of interest.

Messages are sent via emails to Facebook.com inbox for Groups while updates on Pages are shown under Request on user’s homepage and send to inbox

Group visibilities on profiles are shown as a small text link while Page visibility shows on a fan’s profile with an image & text link.

Groups are publicly indexed and searchable (single page only) while Pages in addition to being publicly indexed & searchable, also shows up on fan’s public search listings.

Applications with Groups are limited with events, discussion, walls, links, photos & videos while Pages can accommodate thousands of applications.

Group engagement activities are shown on the administrator’ personal profile while Business Page activities are shown on the page itself unless the settings are changed.

Members joining & engagement activities on Groups are distributed across news feeds however, users can become a fan on a page and the action is distributed in news feeds along with updates & content shared by the Business Page.

Setting up Facebook.Com Group

Go to www.facebook.com/groups.php and click “Create a New Group”

Complete the basic information for the group, invite friends and configure the Groups Privacy settings, which is advisedly to be kept “Open” to make your Group easily available across Facebook.com

FB 9: 10 Facebook.com Aspects for Business Best Practices

Be interactive, fun & helpful with the content delivery and updates on your business Page

Embed videos on your FaceBook.Com Page

Create a common connection between Facebook.com and the outside world

Create contests on Facebook.com

Integrate traditional advertising on Facebook.com

Use Facebook.com to build your email list and vice versa

Introduce new products on Facebook.com first

Welcome new page visitors by establishing expectations with new fans by implementing a welcome landing page that invites and encourages new visitors to Like your Business Page.

Integrate social content on your Facebook.com Business Page by incorporating content from other social channels like Youtube.com, SlideShare.com, etc and extend the life and reach of that content.

“Like” other businesses Facebook.Com Pages, business partners, valued vendor & customers and Facebook.com will notify the administrators of those pages and create the possibility for them to return favor and Like your Business Page as well, thus leveraging Facebook.com for co-marketing efforts.