Facebook and Small Businesses

If you found last week’s article on using Google alerts and tweet beep as listening posts for your business useful try this one out: Addict-o-matic (Inhale the web) www.addictomatic.com. Addict-o-matic allows you to enter key words, industry, your brand, or your competitors’ names and instantly search the “known galaxy” to find out if anyone is talking about your topic. Try it out, book mark it, and see what you can find out about your business.

Next week I move to some more “traditional” areas of interest to small businesses, but I wanted to finish with some suggestions for those of you considering using Facebook for marketing. At the ASU SBTDC we have found Facebook to be a useful tool to find and communicate with people who want to know about small business issues. With over 325 million users and more than 300,000 small business pages it is the largest social media networking site.

But using Facebook correctly takes some planning. The first item may mean making some changes to your existing Facebook profile. If you are like most of us, we got on Facebook initially as a social medium sharing news, gossip, pictures, and yes…Farmville with our friends. Then people started toying with Facebook as a marketing tool for their business or organization. One distinction to remember that is very important: Facebook Profiles are for people, Facebook Pages are for organizations. Using your profile to “sell” is a good way to get shut down by the Facebook police.

But to develop a Page you must link it to a profile. This is a concern to many who are not sure they want “strangers” to see their personal information. But with just a little work you can modify your profile to separate your friends and family from business contacts or customers into distinct lists. Then with Facebook’s new privacy tools you can determine exactly what parts of your profile are visible to the different groups of “friends”. On my Facebook profile, www.facebook.com/herb.lawrence, I would put you into a list called ASU SBTDC contacts separate from my family list, high school friend list; military list, etc. then create privacy settings that let me determine what your list can see on my profile. These are easy tools that will allow you to use your profile as a means to “find friends” that you will move over to your pages and build your Facebook Page Fan list without them invading your privacy.

If you would like to know more about how to set your profiles up to make them “Fan Friendly” let me know. We also have a seminar on Thursday, March 18th in Batesville at the Batesville Area Chamber of Conference 409 Vine Street from 6-9 pm on 5 Small Business Strategies for Social Media that you might want to attend. If you would like more information about this workshop call me (870) 972-3517, e-mail me hlawrenc@astate.edu, find me on Facebook or leave a question here. If you already have a Facebook Page and would like the ASU SBTDC to review let me know.