Facebook has over 400 million active users and is growing daily.  Facebook is a great social networking utility that can have an enormous impact on your websites products and services.  When using facebook you want to make the most out of all of your friends, groups, and fan pages.  There are specific techniques that help you make the most out of your facebook account. There are also critical things to not do on Facebook, and the most important thing to avoid is spamming.  People will look down on you for spamming and most of the time they will ignore what you have to say and show hardly any interest in what you do.  When trying to gain friends on facebook show interest in them.  Don’t overwhelm them with too many messages.  When sending a message to someone you want to tell them about yourself, also ask them a question or two so that you get some interaction with that friend.  There are four key factors for you facebook account, your personal profile, your groups, your page, and identifying important friends.

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1.    Your profile is very important for several reasons. Be completely honest about your profile; don’t have a fake name, or the name of your business.  You can have groups and fan pages with these names. If people don’t trust you then they won’t do business with you.  Get personal with your profile; let the reader find out what you are all about. There are several applications on facebook which allow you to show a sneak peak of your website, a business card with a personal touch, places you’ve visited, family tree, and the list goes on and on. When building your profile add as many items as you can that are important to you and it’s something you want the reader to know about you. The last thing you want to do is overload your profile with too many applications, which will make it clouded and impossible to understand. Think of your facebook profile as a sneak peek into your personal life and business. Do you want people to think that you’re impossible to understand? Of course not, so keep it simple and clear. Apply the same kinds of thoughts into your profile as you would your website.

2.   Your groups are a place where you develop discussions, topics, and share ideas with people and businesses.  You want to have your own groups so that you can send interesting messages and comments to the people within your group.  Remember not to spam your group with tons of content about something they may not have an interest in at that timeWhen spamming you will notice that people are leaving your group because they are tired of all the messages.  This is also a good way to get your account disabled.  When forming groups for the purpose of your business remember to invite people to join that can help you network your group or those that are your target market.  You then can have fun events, discussions, competitions, and other forms of interaction to get the group involved with you and what you do.  Offer to talk with anyone about anything they would like.  Show interest in your group by constantly updating the news and making small changes or additions to your group’s profile.  This moves you up in the recently updated area for members and friends of members to see your group (this helps your group grow).

3.  Your fan page is important because this is where people become your fan.  Currently we have almost 1,700 fans on Facebook for our Get2Marketing fan page.  Your page is similar to your group except you don’t send messages to the members; you send updates to your fans.  You talk about your business and get very detailed with your fans about your products and or services.  If you have fans then they are interested in you and your business.

4.  Identifying important players within facebook is critical because they are a gateway for your business.  You will notice who out there is doing things on a big level and you want to chat with them to pick their brains (this will help you learn about what they are doing), they will communicate with you because all big time facebooker’s (as we like to call them), know that interaction is the key to getting traffic from the social utility.  So when forming a personal profile, groups, pages, remember to keep track of the big time facebooker’s.  If they ask you to join one of their groups join it.  They will notice this and join your groups as well.  Remember one thing, facebook is for socializing not so much advertising (that’s the purpose), so do as much socializing as you can without breaking the rules.  Also the most important thing to do is read the terms of use and do not break their rules (sometimes you can bend them but we don’t recommend this), they will disable your account and you will have to start all over. Visit some of Facebook accounts.