Where do you have the possibility of interacting with 500 million people for free? Facebook. According to their statistics the average user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 community pages. How is your Facebook fan page doing?
Now that you can use Facebook through your page instead of your personal profile you have an even better chance of building a good business network. Here are three key things to always remember:
1. Content is king. I know you’ve probably heard that before, but it’s still true. It doesn’t matter if it’s newsletter content or Facebook content – it’s still king. On Facebook you need to have fresh content once a day at the least! Two or three times a day is much better. If you struggle with knowing what to post make a plan. Use an RSS reader or one of the many other services out there to group together your favorite sites. This will give you ideas and links to share.
2. Don’t outsource the basic interactions. Feel free to hire an assistant to customize your fan page, make a fancy welcome page, or run a contest, but you need to manage the daily stuff yourself. You’ll want to mix up the strictly personal content with the business content. People will consume the business content but they tend to interact more with the personal content.
3. Reach out. Remember that you are building your social network and a net spreads in lots of directions. You should reach out to others, comment on their updates, ask questions, share photos, etc. You wouldn’t attend a conference and just tell everybody about yourself, right? You would try to learn about the others around you.
These 3 keys will help you in any social media setting; but it’s a good reminder that Facebook has a lot of potential and you need to have a presence there. The only investment required is your time and while we know that time is money – 500 million Facebook users is a big audience!
