Social Media Strategies

At first I thought the FaceBook hype and romance would fade away as newer and better social applications kept trotting along - until I used it myself. For businesses, FaceBook has a lot of revenue potential as it is a wealth of deep relationships based consumer data.

Having said that, its important to note that you can’t just jump into the bandwagon and start marketing there - its a gradual process.

Facebook Profile: Your first step to creating a presence there is your facebook profile - this is a personal profile of ‘you’ not your business. You need to have a personal element to your business if you want room in these social networking sites. This personal touch makes your business seem more human and thus likable. So, in Facebook, your personal profile should be about you - the image that you want to share with your networks. Eventually, when people start following you, they will also become interested in your business. But initially, make sure you get your personal profile right. Here are some tips for that:

- Add aspects of your personality that may seem interesting to your market or may help build credibility. You have to make people want to be your real friend.

- Make your profile visible and open so that people that you know can easily find and contact you. E.g. its a good idea to list down your colleges and school names so that you can find your old classmates from there. Same goes for past work experiences. Old friends can become great resources for your business.

- When you are filling out your profile, make sure you take special care to fill the activities and interests sections.

- Enlist your websites in your profile, so that people who are interested in finding out more about you know where to go.

- Make it as personal and real as possible. Put up a real picture of you instead of an avatar or a cartoon image. Get real - get focused.

- Your profile can later have multiple facebook pages for the different aspects of your business. But you have to make sure that you have just one Facebook profile for you as an individual.

Facebook Pages:

Next off, once you have your Facebook profile all set up, you can build as many separate pages as you want for your businesses, products, events or launches. You can customize and design your pages around your business and position yourself as an expert, if you want. These pages are meant for businesses, so they have ‘fans’ instead of ‘friends’ in them. I’m going to discuss how you can find and make friends and bring them to your pages later on.

Facebook pages are an incredibly powerful tool for marketing. They’re free platforms and spaces for your business right in the middle of your targeted customers. A few pointers about Facebook pages:

- To build a Facebook page, go through the simple process of creating a new page (facebook.com/business) anyone can view Facebook pages and can search for them using search engines.

- You can make as many Facebook pages as you want - theres no limit to the number of pages you can create for your business(s). Although, keep in mind that pages have to be for real entities.

- You can make your pages interesting by adding pictures, applications, posts and links (to your sites). Whenever you change something on your page, an update is sent to all of the fans of the page in their news feeds.

- When you have your basic page set up, allow the community to build around it. Let people join, become fans, upload photos, write on the wall - make them feel like its their space. All of these activities become incentives of their friends to join, when they get to read about the activities on their news feeds.

- Make everything an experience. Make the pages interesting and interactive so that they appeal to or empower your targeted audiences. If you’re launching an event, make an event page and get the prospects to contribute to the event setup. You have to give people reasons for being a part of your community. This goes back to your initial relationship building strategies and techniques.

The other elements of Facebook like their walls are simple enough to understand once you have the basic profile and pages set up. Walls are just places where you can communicate with others with messages or comments. Now that you have it all set up, in the next two posts I’m going to talk about how to network using Facebook and how to Promote your products or launches on Facebook.

Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)

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