Facebook is not just about poking the people you like, secretly checking the pages of the people you don’t and chatting to your great aunt Mary in Australia.  More and more businesses are starting to use the website to drive more traffic to their business page and along with Twitter, it’s amongst the most popular ways to use social media for marketing.

 

Creating a Company Profile

Originally Facebook was just for fun, personal use and setting up a personal profile for businesses was strictly forbidden.  However, having seen the potential for growth there, Facebook have added a ‘pages’ feature in which you can set up a page for your business or service.  You might find the pages facility a little tricky at first but you’ll soon get the hang of it.  When your page is up and running, it will be searchable so people can find you using the standard search on Facebook.  You might find that your list of ‘likers’ is a bit limited at first so try tapping into your personal network, pointing them at your new page and encouraging them to donate a blue thumb.  From here, you can use your page to post things like news, new products and blog posts that will flash up in the news feed of anyone who ‘likes’ you.

 

Starting Building a Network

Once you start mining the depths of Facebook pages, you’ll probably stumble across a lot of your business contacts and even business rivals.  Chances are they all have pages already.  You can start working your way around these pages and adding them as friends of your page.  You can also use the search facility to invite people to your page.

 

Use Facebook to Promote Your Website and Blog

As mentioned above, you can use your new Facebook page to drive traffic to your website and promote your blog to a whole new host of potential traffic.  There’s a ‘notes’ tab on Facebook that you may already be familiar with on Facebook.  This allows you to post copies of your newest blog posts – try posting the first paragraph with a ‘read more’ link to the rest of the blog entry on your website.

Facebook can help drive significantly more traffic to your website as part of a larger marketing campaign.  But as with anything, the amount of traffic you receive from Facebook does depend on the amount of time and effort you put in to building up your page, your network and your general activity on the site.

You can start off small and just have a page that displays your logo, your basic information and your web address.  You can start to build up from there as you familiarise yourself with the way Facebook works.  Some of the tools can be a little tricky at first but once you’ve learnt how to use them, you can start syncing up your blog and any other new posts that may be featured elsewhere so that they are automatically loaded onto your Facebook page.