Category: Viral Marketing, Social Media
Summary & Overview
Facebook is a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. The website's membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 300 million active users worldwide.
A January 2009 www.Compete.com study has ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.
Alexa Traffic Rank
#2
The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past three months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.
Setup Time
Less than 1 Hour.
Ongoing Maintenance
As Facebook is a social media outlet expect to spend time keeping your content fresh and cultivating relationships.
Cost
Free.
Speed of Results
Moderate.
Basic Use
Your profile should be all about you, as a person, as people will be more inclined to add you as a friend. Be sure, however, to include your business domain name to the website section in your personal profile. This is the only place in your profile that should have to do with business. Remember, this is an opportunity for people to get to know the “real you,” and begin relating to you as a person, before they begin doing business with you. So be real with who you are, your hobbies and interests, your personal priorities or causes, etc. as this will assist you in building relationships.
Basic Action Steps
- Sign Up for Facebook
www.Facebook.com
- Complete Your Profile
Complete your profile information as quickly as possible. Remember, you can come back any time and edit this information.
- Add Photographs To Your Profile
Add photographs to your profile keeping in mind you can set up separate photo albums by theme, topic, personal, etc.
- Invite Friends
- Become a fan of Michael Wyrosdick’s Facebook business page.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Michael-W-Wyrosdick/114628661896046?v=wall
Basic Tips & Tricks
• You can only have one Facebook account. They are fairly strict about this.
• When adding friends, it's always wise to write a note to the person, mentioning how you know them.
• There are many “groups” you can join on Facebook. Groups can be categorized by everything from former schools and towns, to business and social interests.
• You can always build your Facebook profile over time. The most important thing is to get the ball rolling, and get your profile setup with some basic pictures.
• Use some discretion in how much personal information you share about you, your family and your children as you will be adding complete strangers as your friends.
Intermediate Strategies
Once you have your basic personal profile set up you can now set up your Facebook page, which will be all about your business. While you can have only one Facebook profile, you can link multiple pages to that profile.
Because Facebook Business Pages DO rank in the search engines and Facebook now gets about the same amount of traffic as Google, building out your Facebook business pages is a great place to begin building your business brand.
Following is a brief summary of the key differences between your Personal Profile and your Business Page:
Facebook Personal Profile: Facebook Business Page:
A Facebook “Profile” is a personal page. A Facebook “Page” is a business page.
You can have only one Facebook profile. You can have many Facebook business pages linked to your personal profile.
Facebook profiles DO NOT show up in search engine results. Facebook business pages DO show up in search engine results.
Facebook profiles have “Friends” Facebook business pages have “Fans”
You CAN send friend requests. You CANNOT send Fan requests.
Intermediate Action Steps
- Sign up for Facebook Business Page
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages
- Complete Your Basic Information
Complete your basic information as quickly as possible. Remember, you can come back any time and edit this information.
- Add Pictures or Logos
Add your own business-related picture or logo
- Link to Your Business Landing Page
If you have a personal or business web page, link it to your Facebook page.
Intermediate Tips & Tricks
You can promote your Facebook business page by linking it to your website, blogs, Squidoo lenses or any of your other social media/content sharing sites.
If you have a Twitter account you can link it to your Facebook profile. When you update what you are doing on Twitter, it will also update on Facebook.
Disclaimer: Michael Wyrosdick is committed to providing you with the highest quality tools and resources to support your business. You should, however, conduct your own due diligence before purchasing any products or outsourcing any projects as Michael Wyrosdick cannot guarantee the services or products as provided by third party vendors.
Related Marketing Strategies
• Twitter
• Blogging
• Squidoo
• MySpace
Questions, Comments, Feedback & Suggestions
For questions about Facebook, please send an email to resources@michaelwyrosdick.com with “Facebook” in your subject line.
