Facebook for Business

You've certainly heard the hullabaloo about Facebook. Strictly by the numbers, it's now the world's fifth largest country. 

Perhaps you have family members who you feel spend way too much time on the online social networking phenomenon known as Facebook. And perhaps you've written it off as anything but useful for business. 

Think again! 

Facebook has tremendous power to connect you, the company, to your customers. 

You've heard the marketing expression that you should fish where the fish are? That's true of social networking on Facebook for individuals, companies and organizations. 

Best Practices 

For organizations and companies, a Facebook fan page is the way to go. Some nonprofits and just-for-fun ventures may choose a Facebook group, but groups lack the functionality of pages (see PeteCodella.com [http://www.petecodella.com/know-how-to-use-facebook-to-promote-a-brand-or-event-1000202.htm] for more details). 

Fan pages give you a shorter, nicer looking URL, the ability to add other applications and promote your page throughout Facebook, as well as the all-important analytics feature so you know how many people are visiting your fan page. 

Inbound Marketing 

Companies that utilize the blogosphere to share information or commentary can also benefit from Facebook fan pages. The notes application allows you to import an RSS feed into your Facebook fan page. 

If you blog or use an online newsroom, you should import that RSS feed into your Facebook fan page notes application and benefit from automatic publishing of your RSS feed inside of Facebook, reaching key constituencies you may not otherwise reach. 

Publishing content - and by the way, creative, engaging, unique content is king, president, ruler magistrate . . . you get the picture - on a variety of platforms yields more than one ticket to the online search lottery. The more tickets you have, the greater your chances of winning - showing up on the top of organic search results. And nothing's better at search placement than social media tools. 

Maintaining content on various channels - like a corporate Web site, blog, online newsroom, Facebook fan page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and Flickr photo stream - allows you to link to your various Web properties and drive traffic to the most important sites at the most opportune times. 

This practice of driving traffic to various online sites is called inbound marketing. 

Important Social Tool 

Facebook fan pages are simply one of the best social tools companies and organizations can use. They are free to establish and require only time and skill to maintain. If you don't have the time or skill in-house, you can always hire someone to help. 

You in essence create a social networking place for people who support your organization where they can share comments and images, and be updated on important events, news and information. 

If you don't do anything else with social media, perhaps you should consider creating a Facebook fan page to take advantage of the opportunity to interact with key online audiences in ways you haven't before. 

Pete Codella, APR is a social media evangelist. In addition to serving as the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City's first program director, he is the owner and operator of Codella Marketing and NewsCactus. He has received numerous awards and always enjoys a good communication challenge. See PeteCodella.com for more information.