Using Facebook For Business

In 2010, a website doesn’t have to be the only place people can find you online. Social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and of course Facebook give you many other opportunities to present your business or your brand.

These won’t be suitable for everyone, but if you can find your audience there, then perhaps you should be there too. Promoting your site is just as important as building it.

If you are creating a Facebook group from a business perspective, it is important to understand the purpose of the group.

Facebook groups work similar to blogs and forums in that you can use them to communicate with members in the community as well help increase awareness of products, news and services in your organisation or industry.

Top tips for success

Growing the Community

It’s important that you can continue to grow the number of members in your community for a couple of reasons. First of all, it gives other group members the confidence that your group is of interest. Secondly, more members usually means more people viewing your content and more perspectives in the discussion.

Fresh and relevant content

As with any blog or information portal on the web, users will come back if the content stays fresh and is relevant to their needs. Most businesses post relevant links to PDFs, case studies or posts regularly and this is useful in providing content for members as well as promoting content from other industry sources. Besides textual content, consider uploading images for your members to view – if you’re in the travel industry, post destinations or discounts for example.

Promote discussion

It can be difficult to get your members to initiate conversation, so it’s important to get the conversation rolling with questions related to hot topics. Discussion boards are an excellent way to share ideas and get multiple perspectives on a given topic.

Leverage the community

If you have a community that is truly engaged with your group (i.e. they actively participate in discussions, communicate with you offline, post links/images video) then you can leverage the community by promoting new whitepapers, events and industry news. This can be done with mass messaging to the entire group. You can also segment the delivery of the content based on the members’ geographic location or type of organisation.