Originally restricted to Harvard college students, Facebook was launched in 2004.Today it has increased in size to over 750 million users and has a revenue of over 2 billion per year. It is the second most popular website on the internet and so the opportunity for marketing is huge.
Facebook earns most of its income through banner advertising but in this article about how to work facebook I will not be looking at advertising directly but instead the free methods that can be used to direct traffic to your website and develop your client base .
1) Setting Up Your Profile
To use the multiple functions of Facebook you must first have a main profile page with a unique email address and preferably your own name as opposed to your company name. As an internet marketer you should look at this page as a way of ‘branding’ yourself. Because of the nature of Facebook it is designed to work by networking peoples names.
Also fill in details about your education and business to help with networking, however you really don’t need to include personal tastes, in fact adding this information may result in you receiving targeted advertising.
The privacy settings are easily customizable however I would recommend you do not make your profile page public. As you will be branding yourself you will want to include some personal information about yourself and family. There are other pages on Facebook that can be viewed publicly, your profile page should not be one of them
To get contacts or ‘friends’ on Facebook you can import your contact lists from other places , search for people on Facebook manually, add ‘mutual’ friends or even use take advantage of Facebook’s “Friends You Might Know” function which searches through your networks, schools, friends of friends etc to provide suggestions of people you may want to add. Individual profiles have a limit of 5000 friends. You can set up rss feeds directly from your blog and post links from any url you like directly on to your wall.
Remember you want to present yourself as being someone who is honest and trustworthy as well as likable as well as being someone who knows what they are talking about.
2) Setting Up Group Pages
Facebook groups are like real life groups in that a group is formed by people with a common interest. You can join a group that already exists or create your own. Groups have a limit of 5000 members. Groups are designed for more interaction than fan pages and you can message all members of your group with notifications that go to their inbox. Being part of a group of people in the same business as you or being in a group with potential customers is fantastic from a learning point of view as well as the possibilities for marketing.
3) Pages
Pages or Fan Pages as they used to be known share much in common with Groups and are designed for people to follow a brand, famous person, politician, organization etc. They are not intended to be as interactive as groups. Pages do not have any limits on the number of ‘fans’ who can join . Like Groups you can join one or create one. To create one simply type ‘pages’ into the Facebook search bar then click on ‘create page’ on the page that is revealed.
There is a lot of discussion on the internet about how to work Facebook when it comes to using Pages or Groups, they both have disadvantages and advantages.
Just as having the ability to ‘work the room’ is valuable when it comes to networking offline, knowing how to ‘work Facebook’ is very useful for internet marketers
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