Facebook For Companies: Using Facebook For Business

Friday 8/13/10 - Heikki @Moogo

While most of us treat Facebook as a way to keep in touch, and communicate with our buddies, we shouldn't forget that Facebook can be used as an effective business tool as well. It's a great platform for marketing your products, landing gigs and connecting with your customers. Of course it never hurts to play a little Farmville and Mafia Wars on the side, too. Apologies, I digress.

What makes Facebook good is the fact it is the social network that has the broadest audience and the most community functionality of any of the big services right now. While in the early days people thought of Facebook as something for college students, recent graduates, and technology early adopters, the reality nowadays is that Facebook users in the 35 and older category are growing at a very fast rate. According to Inside Facebook, as of early 2010, over 30% of Facebook users are over 35.

With these facts in mind, there is a definite reason for companies to have a presence on Facebook. While there are several primary ways to participate on Facebook: profile page, company page (public), groups, and applications. Each one of these is used differently, so let's cover the basics of each point.

Profile page

Will the real you please stand up. Make sure that people in your company are on Facebook as them selves. After you've checked that you are exactly you, head on over to Facebook, and start by getting a personal account. Enter your personal profile information, add a snappy profile picture, do status updates, and friend a few people that you know. This is the best way to learn more about how people use Facebook, and it will help you better understand how to use it for your company, because companies should interact on Facebook like people do.

Company page

After you are comfortable using Facebook as an individual, you should create a company page. People can then choose to “like” your company, and you can use this page as a lightweight community effort. As soon as you have reeled them into 'liking' you, they will start to receive status updates and news that you post in their feed. While profile pages have education / work information and interests, public pages have location, hours of operation, company overview, mission, date founded, and more. Some features include: wall with messages, events, video, pictures, notes, and more.

After you have created your page, the URL of the page is quite messy, and definitely not something you would use in your marketing efforts. But fear not, after you have lured 25 people into 'liking' your company, you can permanently change it something more suitable from here.

Quick tip: if you get around to creating a company page, you should display photos of the people in your company who are manning and overseeing this page. This way you will create a nice personal touch, and nobody has to hide behind the company logo while posting something on the page.

Quick tip (redux): after you're a more seasoned Facebook user, create a landing page for your company page. These are often used to promote deals, call attention to new products, or simply welcome visitors with an attractive branded splash page. Anyone with a page can create one, but it takes a little effort. Read more on Mashable.

Groups.

You can create a group on Facebook around any imaginable topic. Groups – not matter how silly in nature – can become successful for lightweight community activities, especially when they also involve an in person element. It's always good to show transparency on every social media platform, so I suggest that you keep your on public mode, unless you're the CIA or any other government spook offshoot.

Applications.

Warning! This is the techie part of this post. Skip, if you feel like it, or read if you are interested.

It might also make sense for your company to create an application that people can use on Facebook. This is a great way to get people to interact more with you and your product. Check out what Nike for example has done with theirs.

An application could also interface with your existing technologies. One example could be, that users could login to your service using their Facebook login information. If this peaked your interested, read more here.

There are certainly other ways to use Facebook, but this covers the basic ways that most companies will want to use it. In general, remember to participate as a person first and as a company second.