'Social Media'

Market Your Business on Facebook

25 JAN 2010 1

Before you say, "Facebook, isn't that some kids thing like MySpace?", take a look at these Facebook demographic statistics real quick:

  1. Facebook has more than 350 million active users.
  2. The Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
  3. More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
  4. Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month

Facebook started as a cleaner alternative to MySpace and had its initial popularity in the student demographic, however it's grown steadily and become a massive social network that most certainly contains people who would be interested in your services or products. Best of all, you can take advantage of that market with little to no cost.

Business profiles are not new to Facebook, but initially they were only available to large companies. Large brands like Walmart and Verizon had profile pages for their company, users could visit and become a "fan" of the company. Then when users visited the "fan's" profile, they would see a link to the company profile. On a medium to large scale, this can gain a business a lot of exposure, but the cost of having a business profile was very high... until now. Recently, Facebook opened up 'business pages' so that anyone can create a business profile for free. Now you don't have to be a fortune 500 company to tap into Facebook's 350-million+ users.

So How Do I Get Started?

It's pretty straightforward to get started, you can create your own page by clicking here.

Step 1: Spend some time deciding on the best category for your business, because your category is not easily changed later.

Step 2: Enter your business name and click create.

Step 3: The more information about your business you upload, the better, but you should at least enter a basic write-up, operating hours and location (if applicable), a link to your webpage, and a picture of your storefront or logo. Any extra information is great - if you're a Real Estate agent for instance, you can post open house's you are running as events on the profile. If you have a portfolios or pictures of jobs you've done, put them in an album with a description for each picture. Post any customer testimonials on your main page.

Setp 4: Click on your business name in the top left corner, and you should then see a "Publish This Page" link. You need to click this before anyone will be able to see your business on Facebook.

Step 5: Finally, near the top right you should see the text "Become a Fan" (but only if you're logged into your personal Facebook account - if you're not, you can click here to create one, it just takes a minute).

Now the fun begins, your friends can see your business from your profile and become a fan of it. Then it will display on their page as well. It's likely that you have some of your customers on your friends list already, or if you are just creating an account, it's likely that some of your customers are already on Facebook. Find them, and ask them to become a fan of your business. The more fans you have, the more exposure you'll get - and the more potential you'll have to get new customers through Facebook.

Of course, Lifeline has a business profile right here. Feel free to become a fan of us, we'd really appreciate it. If you're a customer, We'll become a fan of your business too!

So how do you get your customers to become Fans of your business? Well, a contest is a great way to go about this. We give away $20 every month to one random fan on our Facebook Page, so become a fan now for your chance to win!

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