Are You Using Facebook?

There are several reasons to use Facebook for your business. Networking with your current customers, finding new ones, launching products or pushing information out to a large group. All can be beneficial to keeping your business in front of people.

You can create a fan page based on your business or product, if it’s something that’s appropriate for what you do. People are fans of more than just musicians, causes, and TV shows. If your customers are naturally congregating on Facebook, you can give them a place to hopefully talk with other customers about your product. And you can push information out to them by posting news, promotions, and other information to the fan page.

If you Twitter, you can set your Twitter stream to cross-post to your Facebook wall. You can also set other services like StumbleUpon, delicious, and even a blog to post short blurbs to Facebook. Why would you want to do this? For starters, it keeps your content fresh. Secondly, if you’re sharing information with your customers — and it’s helpful information — you become a trusted source for them.

You can also see what’s important to your customers. By seeing what they and their friends are talking about, it gives you a better idea of how to best interact with them. Maybe you’ll see a problem they have that you can solve. If you can offer a solution without being pushy, just offer to help, you improve that relationship.

Just make sure than you join in on conversations and do more than just promote you or your product. Add some substance to whatever it is people are talking about. If you only say “Buy this, buy this, buy this” people will ignore you. Do it enough and they’ll start telling others to ignore you, too. Don’t spam. Offer value. Earn trust. Give a little something extra. Build a fan base.

image: lumaxart.com