It’s time to start taking social media seriously if you haven’t up till now. I’m going to take a look at all the major social media sites in a new series: Social Media for Business.
As I predicted at the beginning of the year, social media is becoming more and more important as a business tool and you ignore it at your peril.

First up is FaceBook

Personally I find FaceBook extremely time-consuming but I have to concede that it can be a powerful business tool when used properly.

As with all social media its greatest benefit is that it allows you to have a greatly extended reach: your profile can potentially expose you to thousands of visitors online. If you do it right and that’s a big if.

FaceBook Demographics

If you’re wondering exactly what is the potential for extended reach, consider that FaceBook has a whopping 175 million users: only 50 million of them are in the US and 9 million in the UK. So if you’re an international outfit, you need applications like FaceBook to make sure you’re getting the potential international coverage you need.

“Yeah, but all you get on FaceBook is kids obsessed with games and music…” Not so! The fastest growing demographic on FaceBook is the 33-40 year-olds, but the over 55s are close behind them. Those are powerful demographics for the business crowd aren’t they?

There are three very important rules you need to follow if you want to be a social media success: I’ll be repeating this later because it doesn’t just apply to FaceBook:

• Never, ever be aggressive or rude. If you wipe someone out on FaceBook chances are it will go viral because everyone loves a fight. But you will put people off doing business with you for good. Always be nice even if you disagree.
• Keep your readers engaged: include interesting stuff for them and…
• Give people something to take away. Nothing creates likeability than solving another person’s problems for them–for free. It is a great concept that John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing talks about in detail.

You need to spend time connecting with people on FaceBook, and once you’ve done that you need to spend more time engaging with them. If you’re not prepared to do that then perhaps Social Media in all its glory simply isn’t for you.

Engage with your customers on a personal level

One of the hugest advantages of engaging with your customers through social media is that they get to see a side of you that they normally wouldn’t: you become a friend to them and everyone loves to do business with a friend. Successful FaceBook users, or Power Users, find that their business grows virally because they’re giving people what they want or need, so those connections go away and tell other connections to go check it out.

If you ever run into reputation problems online (if, in other words, you have someone publishing unpleasant stuff about you), a strong FaceBook presence can be a wonderful ally in your reputation management strategy. You can also use FaceBook for proactive reputation management. Which is basically making sure that the naysayers can’t get a foot in the door.

So what can you do to make sure that visitors find your FaceBook page engaging and useful?

• Industry news (trade shows, exhibitions, product recalls…you get the idea)
• Tips on using your products/services
• Stories about how your producst/services have helped people
• Stories about your employees and your customers
• Special offers
• You can link to or provide product reviews

One more very important point: you can also advertise directly on FaceBook. With numbers like 175 million and a great demographic you can be sure that your ads will come up in front of the right people. Highly targeted marketing like that is hard to come by.

You might find some useful additional points in this article:  How to develop a FaceBook page that attracts millions of fans.

Want to know what’s the single most important thing you can do to increase your conversion and grow your business? No, I’m not about to sell you on some insane program. This is vital stuff that you can and should be doing for low-cost or free.

Again and again search marketers tell their clients that they really, really need to track everything they do. Sadly a lot of the time this sage advice falls on deaf ears. If you’re new to the business the whys and wherefores of tracking everything you do online can be missed, to be sure.

But this subject is worth grappling with and I can’t think of a better example than Facebook, which is now worth a whopping $15 billion according to the (very reasonable) calculations of Danny Dover over at SEOmoz.org

Just for the sake of comparison, MySpace changed hands in 2005 for a mere $580 million, yet it has been around for much longer than Facebook, which is only five years old, and the MySpace user base was over 100 million as of 2006.

Now why should Facebook be worth so much more than any of the other social networking sites?

It’s all down to tracking. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tracked everything his members do and stored that information.

So what?

Well just think for a moment how much more effective it would be if you wanted to place an ad on Facebook, and you could choose the age and gender of your target market. Not only that, but you could match your product to their interests (just to mention a few simple parameters of search). Just think how much you could increase your conversion rate by knowing these details and being able to target in this way.

Well, that’s the secret. That’s why advertising on Facebook is likely to be so much more effective than advertising on any of the other social marketing sites.

Now, almost certainly this information is going to have you rushing out to arrange for tracking of your site. Good idea. But before you do it take the time to shop around. If your web hosting doesn’t provide you with a range of comprehensive tracking tools (mine does: the button to HostGator is to your right over there), then go and sign up immediately with Google Analytics. Its free, you can track as many sites as you want, and you can even set some goals for yourself over there.

Stay tuned for a post on the best tracking tools out there in the next day or two.