Many of us have heard of Facebook and many of us use it to connect with family and friends.  But, have you ever considered using Facebook to promote your business?

Facebook is now both the largest and fastest growing social network.  With people spending a great deal of time there during their personal time, there is also an increased opportunity to connect with both customers and business contacts.

The biggest concern I have heard from clients/readers is not letting business contacts see all the silly stuff you do with your family and friends.  Facebook makes it possible to create different networks of contacts each with different levels of access to your profile.  This allows you to create a business network that doesn’t have access to your poke war with your college buddies.

Ok, so how do you tap into this network of potential?  One way is through traditional advertising – ads on the side of the page.  Facebook contextual targets their ads, so there is a bit of a higher chance they’ll be clicked on.  But, as with all advertising, people tend to ignore ads.

If you start thinking a bit more about your customers, you could create a page that highlights your business and automatically imports content from various sources – your website, blog, twitter, etc.  The idea here is to provide valuable content for your customers and a means for them to interact with your company (via a discussion).  This page could then be promoted through ads on the network.

Also available are groups. You could create one for your customers so they could interact with each other as well as you.  These work best if there’s a bit of momentum, so try enlisting some of your customers and business contacts to help you out.  You’ll need to lead discussions to get things started – and don’t treat this like a spam list or it’ll have a very negative effect.

Do you use Facebook for business?  If so, how?

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