Everything about facebook’s business features
20 percent of the internet users on the planet or about 200,000,000 people and growing are on facebook. So if you do online business, you might as well do it where most people are. Right?
The first thing to do then would be to set yourself up properly on this mammoth medium. Whatever profile you might have, review it keeping the following cardinals in mind:
- Put up a good picture. Remember, facebook is like a party… look proper; welcoming
- Write a short profile note that establishes the thing about you people will find irresistible
- Set up at most 3 website links; to your blog, your system page and your twitter account. If you don’t have these, great! Put your name and email in the box in the left column of the facebook expert profile and you’ll see how to to set them all up shortly. Do NOT put your business site link here… it’s like going to a party with a briefcase
- Fill your interests and activities in a way that is ‘bulleted’ for it is these words that help people ‘search’ you out
- Write a brief “About me”… use it to re-establish your unique, specific value and save the details for your blog. In facebook we only want people to feel, “hey, this person is cool to know!”.
- Go to the expert’s fb profile (link above) for guidance. And make friends with him
Having done this, the first key task is to expand your ‘friends’ circle to target profiles you’d like to do business with. So where do you find them? There’s a ‘search’ bar on the top right corner of fb. Find it and place the qualities you are looking for there. For instance, if I were to do this I’d type ‘network marketers’. A lot of “people”, “groups” and “pages” will come up.
Now click on any ‘page’ or ‘group’ that has a large following. Scroll down that page till you see the members / fans. Right click on “show all” to open in a new window. What you have before you are other facebookers in your field… which is why they subscribed to that group / fan-page in the first place!
Your task is to “Add as a friend” about 40-50 of them everyday. It takes about 10 minutes to do so. And while you do, copy-paste a one-line “personal message” that helps them associate with you. Else they will wonder about your motives behind befriending and you won’t start a relationship of trust. I use a line like, “Hi xxx, looks like we have xxxxxx in common! I specialize in building profitable businesses and would like to put my 20 years of business experience to your good use. Let’s connect!” Obviously you’ll make relevant changes.
Once friends accept you, you can message them, chat with them, or invite them to whatever else may be of common interest. This is why your profile set up is important so your interests are known. And your choice of friends should be of your target group, to aid business.
The other thing to do is join ‘Groups’. When you have ‘searched’ them, and they are of your interest area, join them too and post somethings on their ‘wall’ and ‘bulletin boards’. Other group members tend to see this stuff and that could trigger a visit to your site.
Getting adventurous, you could also ‘Create a group’ (look for the icon on top of your Groups list). This way you can invite all your friends and they can invite their friends and you can have quite a following if you are providing valuable input. Make sure your choice of group name is attractive. In your group profile you can post pictures, videos and links. Once in every few days you can ‘Message all members’ so they could visit any sites you’d like them to … or just read up some of your ideas and thoughts.
Videos work very well on facebook too. As a communication platform facebook allows you to record videos directly (see an icon titled ‘Video’ among the icons at the bottom left of page). You can share films from your hard disk too. Same for photos. And these can be ‘tagged’ with the names of the people you want to do business with. For example if you sell jewelry, you could ‘tag’ a collection to 20 prospects and the pictures / video would land as a link on their wall!. Isn’t that cool!
In the same way, you can write on and attach links to people’s profile ‘walls’ to draw their attention to your site / article. When you do these things please ensure you address them warmly – like friends – or they’ll be bugged.
In case your business is having an event, you can ‘create an event’ using the icons on the bottom left bar and invite all your friends to it… so the message spreads virally. Just be sure you are harnessing this platform in moderation, with ethics and providing stuff people like to see. Otherwise the consequences may be undesirable; like friends detesting you and even an acount closure by facebook. So think like a trustworthy business owner and have fun with facebook!
