Facebook and LinkedIn are wonderful business tools, but like all tools, they must be handled properly. They are easy to abuse, and this abuse may bring short-term gains, but will hurt business in the long run.

It’s abusive to treat Facebook like a large selling portal by sending out hordes of “spammy” messages. Facebook is the place to create awareness of your business, to create trust in your professional ethics and to bring people to your primary website.

On the other hand, it’s a mistake to set up a profile and just let it sit there. A business needs to engage with those interacting on their wall.

People will come to your page, but if you are only trying to sell them something or are not engaging them at all, you’ll turn away many potential customers.

Interact with your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts daily. Post updates on a regular basis and make sure the content of those posts has ubstance. Focus on interaction and be sure to respond to comments from your fans. Show that you are alive and you care about them and they’ll come back for more.

The proper way to use these valuable tools is to get and keep people’s attention without resorting to gimmicks or hard sells.

Set up a Facebook account for your business and then start to look for other pages where you can make your presence known. Join groups and  respond to questions about your skills to establish you as an expert that a business will want to use. Find groups, networks and fan pages where your market is spending time. The way to do this is to search keywords to find those networks that suit your needs.

Keep your Facebook page interactive with videos and images and interactive content like contests and coupons. Check out the Static FBML  (Facebook Markup Language) app. It lets you add HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to the page. This lets you change your official page beyond the default options by, for instance, adding custom boxes for newsletter sign-up pages. If you’re not into doing this yourself, consider hiring a programmer.

Stay up to date about Facebook by visiting these sites: developers.facebook.com and www.allfacebook.com. And check out  ww.johnjantsch.com, a small business marketing expert who writes about traditional and Web marketing techniques.

Traditional advertising and conferences are still productive when it comes to promoting your business, but online social networking sites like Facebook have the potential to give it a far greater boost. They have many tools that businesses can leverage if they learn how to use them.

Need help navigating this wonderful world of the Web? Give us a call.

How do you know if your Facebook page is helping your business? A quick look at the page will tell you a little. Do you have more fans, more comments, more “likes”? If you do, then you’re reaching more people. Facebook offers “impressions”, which tell you the number of times an item you posted was shown. You can also view the page’s “insights”, the statistics about the number of monthly users, the number of likes and dislikes and posts. Just click See All in the Insights box on the left of the page. Surveys, coupons and sweepstake prizes can also help track the success of your page.

Social Networking is not a panacea, nor is it magic. It is an inexpensive and powerful way to promote your business. But you have to put the same amount of work, thought, care and consistency into it that you would with any marketing scheme in order for it to benefit your business.

Contact us for help. This is OUR business. This is what we do for a living, and we can help you benefit from this great advertising tool.

So you’ve set up your Facebook page. Looks nice, eh? Like the billboard the company put up in the old days. Wrong! This is not static advertising. This gives you the opportunity to offer deals and coupons, keep customers up-to-date on company news and on new products. Add some photos, maybe a video. Ask questions, take polls, schedule special events. The idea is to get your fans reading and talking about your page.

You may want to have an employee in charge of ensuring that the content is always fresh, someone who can get a feel for what customers are saying and what they want…a sort of market research.

A word of caution here. Don’t overload or spam your fans with too much information. There’s a balance here. But whatever you do, engage them. Make sure you do something with your page to make it vibrant and to keep readers coming back.

If you don’t have an employee to spare to work on Facebook and other social networking sites, or you don’t have time yourself, we provide services to keep websites, blogs and Facebook pages constantly updated. Send us the information you want out there and, for a small fee we can do the rest.

Getting connected through social networking to promote your business by putting up a Facebook page doesn’t necessarily announce to the world that you’re there. Your job now is to promote it. Add a Like Box to your company Web site and encourage customers to follow you on Facebook. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, put up a few well-placed signs encouraging your customers to find you on Facebook. Include a sentence or two about your Facebook page in all your other advertising, like fliers, cards and newspaper ads.

Facebook has an advertising platform and even if your advertising budget is small this is a great way to get your name and product  information out to a target group. Go to www.facebook.com/advertising, click on the Create An Ad button and fill in the text fields with the information you want out there. Even paying once for ads, you are likely to attract new fans who are more than likely to stay with you.

There are other options such as Places and Deals that are good for small businesses because they can encourage prospective or existing customers to visit a company premises through deals. Check them out.

We know time is an important commodity for any business. Contact us for help with all this. For a small fee we can help you set up your  page, links, ads and anything else we think will help to promote your business through the incredible power of websites, blogs and social networking.

Facebook is facing competition from Google’s newest social networking program, Google+. How eager are users to build another social network? Time will tell, but it’s worth looking into this newest Google innovation.

How does it work? Users organize themselves into circles of friends so they have a choice as to what they will share with each group. A person is added to the circle by dragging his or her photo on to a labeled circle. Removing someone is easy. Drag their photo out. There are also multi-person video chats, a feature called Sparks that allows users to plug into news of interest to them, and the program also integrates Google’s photo site, Picasa.

At the moment this program is being called a field trial which means it will be tweaked as it grows in number of users. But keep an eye on it. It’s worth watching.

Here’s a new twist, or should we say tweet, on business and social media. Food trucks have discovered ways to notify their customers of their current location by using Facebook and Twitter. They also use social media to tell customers about daily market specials, promotions and hours of operation. They get feedback on food and suggestions for changes in the menu. Whether it’s ice cream, hot dogs or barbeque, these mobile businesses are digitally savvy. Whether your business is mobile or static, social media can be a powerful engine. Call us to help you take advantage of its power.

Once upon a time people created websites and thought everyone would start on the home page. Not anymore. People want to visit lots of sites and read bits of text and then comment on them. A business needs to give out these text bits and have them circulate freely on the social web. On many sites social media referrals are among the top 3 or 4 referring sources, so you need your business to be on the social media services most people use on a daily basis to receive referrals and feedback. You need a social media strategy.

You only need two or three tools to create your core social media strategy. Facebook now has more than 500 million users so it should be one of the building blocks of this strategy. Set up a Fan page to connect with your customers. This page offers a great range of tools such as polls, event postings and a discussion topics board. And once you reach 100 fans you have an even greater range of tools.

Want to know how you’re doing? Facebook Insights is a useful tool for judging the effectiveness of posts made to your companyFacebook page. Like Google Analytics it gives you a chance to look at statistics, data on age, gender and geographic location of your followers.
Note: pages need at least 30 active followers to be included in Insights.

Don’t forget: Facebook needs to be dynamic. Give your fans a reason to come back. The more you post, the more attention you generate. Give more, receive more.

Don’t have time? Our social media experts and blog writers can help. Give us the information you need your customers to know and we’ll get those tweets and blogs posted as often as you please.

There are dozens of tools used by business to share, manage and evaluate social media. Listed below are eleven:

Facebook, a social networking site

Twitter, a communication form based on 140 character
messages

Flickr, a photo-sharing site

YouTube, a video-hosting site

Vimeo, a video-hosting site

Scribd, a document-sharing site

Slideshare, a Powerpoint-sharing site

Tumbr, a micro-blogging site

Posterous, a micro-blogging site

Hootsuite, a dashboard to use multiple social media
accounts

Tweetdeck, a dashboard to use multiple social media
sites

Travel and Facebook are natural partners, according to Facebook spokeswoman, Jillian Carroll. “Travel is inherently social,” she said. Travelers ask their friends for hotel and restaurant recommendations and then share their impressions afterwards. Hotels have begun offering direct bookings through Facebook, luring travelers from on-line travel agencies. “We want to be there when someone transforms the recommendations of their friends into booking a reservation,” said David Godsman, vice president for global web services for Starwood Hotels. “If they press the “like” button, we want to start a conversation.”  Hotels want their booking engines to be found where the customer is, and not ask the customer to search them out. And using social media to communicate can take the relationship beyond the booking transaction to such niceties as preferred pillow type, preferred drinks in the minibar or preferred type of room. Travelers are now expecting trip-related services to be available on the new platforms, and hotels make more money from rooms booked directly than from rooms booked through on-line travel agencies.

Remember small towns and little neighborhoods in big cities where the local vendors knew your name, knew what you liked, where they ‘cared’ about you? A business lived and died by word of mouth. Life changed. Small town centers failed and moved to strip shopping malls. City dwellers moved to the suburbs. Businesses stopped caring. But according to social media guru, Gary Vaynerchuk in his latest book, The Thank You Economy, along came social media and turned the clock back. The author views the world now as a giant small town where businesses have to create that ‘caring’ attitude towards their customers. Anyone on Facebook or Twitter can type in their buying experience, local or not, with the possibility of starting a movement that could make or break a business. Greed isn’t good anymore. In the 24-hours-a-day Internet-connected world, you’ve got to ‘care’ more about your customers than your competition does. Vaynerchuk promotes qualities like good manners, patience, integrity, authenticity and above all, transparency, the art of being totally open and honest with the buying public. Vaynerchuk’s model is pro-consumer and he’s the first to say that not all businesses are on board yet. But he bets that they soon will be. Do you know what your customers are saying about you on Facebook?