I just read a good article by Tom Pick on Facebook for B2B marketing. Here are few things I came away with and a few more ways for professionals to use Facebook.
Facebook Prejudices Impact Your Marketing
As Tom pointed out, in the business world, you will often here something like this:
“LinkedIn is for business and Facebook is for friends and family”
Well, the trouble I have with this is that this smells of prejudgement. And prejudgement is not good because it leads to self-inflicted limitations.
These prejudgements linked to personal identity issues are very similar to what you see in cross-cultural communication.
The extra baggage you carry around will hurt your business. Your marketing will suffer and so will your sales. A whole new world opens up when you simply put the baggage down on the ground long enough to take a look around. You can still decide to pick up the baggage and hold on to it a bit longer, but the more often you set it down, the more you’ll realize prejudgements are just baggage.
Businesses often approach me to help them get more clients using social media communication. But they have a big problem:
- They operate on this assumption or prejudgement that social media is not “professional” enough for them to use
- And then they expect to simply be able to order in some clients with someones who is comfortable using social media.
But this cannot work. It may be called “media” but it doesn’t work like the way “media” used to work in the last century. You are the master of your own social presence online and no one else can create the relationships you need to get results from social media.
Facebook Humanizes Your Business
There is a very important point Tom makes in his article: People buy from other people.
- Facebook results show up high in Google searches and people use Google before making purchasing decisions.
- Facebook allows you to present your business in a way you might not be able to on your business website. And many of your potential buyers will appreciate this more approachable version of your business.
Sure, there are tons of things I hate about Facebook and I can easily see how Facebook doesn’t fit in a traditional business world. But there are a few essential reasons why businesses cannot afford to ignore Facebook.
- Sheer size, if it hasn’t hit you yet, do some research until it does. Facebook is huge.
- Google results. Google cannot afford to not pay attention to Facebook either.
- It gives you a good platform for content marketing. If your business can benefit from being online, your success is centered around content. That’s how you get noticed in the first place.
In addition to this, there are more and more examples of how businesses are using Facebook to create another form of communication with their “traditional” markets to strengthen their market presence.
Facebook Is Best For Nurturing Clients
Of course, once you humanize your business, as Tom points out, you can do a better job at nurturing your clients. But there’s also another reason why nurturing clients is a great tactic to use on Facebook.
- Facebook is about real people
There’s only so much you can get away with on Facebook, because the relationships are much more social and people easily pick up on crap of any sort.
Compare this to your experience on LinkedIn. I often get requests from people looking to hire cross-cultural professionals. And the companies explain they’d appreciate my help, because if they put out a question on LinkedIn, they’ll get a ton of people claiming to be the best in their field. But how can you choose the best people?
This is where a strategic presence on Facebook would make all the difference in nurturing the right impression.
Now that I’ve bounced off a few of the points Tom made in his article, here are a few points of my own I’d like to add about marketing your business on Facebook.
Facebook Business Pages
I’m only online for business. I much prefer to hook up with my friends and family either on the phone or in person. So Facebook is easy for me to navigate: I simply block and hide anything that is not relevant to my business. It only takes a minute or two of regular upkeep on most days, but my Facebook feeds do look clean and professional.
But I understand that some people enjoy using Facebook to keep in touch with their friends and family. This is where the Facebook Business Pages come in very handy.
Did you notice I don’t like using the term “Fan Page”? Facebook itself uses the term Business Page, but everyone likes to refer to the prominent fan button and call these Fan Pages.
It might not be much, but I do consider these as Business Pages. This keeps my focus sharper and helps me to find a communication style on Facebook that fits both the social environment on Facebook and my own business objectives. We’re all learning what it means to humanize your business on Facebook. The simple task of getting rid of the cute personal stuff makes it easier for me to find the right tone and not get annoyed with the distractions.
Facebook Vanity URLs To Get Good Keyword Results In Google Search
When I realized some of the keyword URL’s I create on for my Twitter lists were giving me top level results on Google searches, I quickly created 5 new Business Pages… simply because I wanted the SEO value they could provide. Hey, I’m going after a couple of heavy keywords and I wanted to get them before anyone else did.
Unfortunately I sat on them for several weeks before daring to ask friends to fan all of these pages. So I lost one of the vanity URLs I was after: International Business, but I used International Business Ideas for the vanity URL instead.
Here are all of my Facebook Business Pages:
- CKbiz – my main Business Page. I had already used the URL CindyKing.biz for my profile page.
- GetInternationalClients – an old website I want to bring back from the ashes as soon as the Drip plugin for WishList Member is released
- InternationalBusinessIdeas
- InternationalSocialMedia
- InternationalMarketing
- InternationalSales
After creating these Facebook Business Pages, I found out that you can also create vanity URLs for any of the links on your Business Pages. So for example, you can create a vanity URL with keywords for the tabs on your Facebook Business Page and use these to promote. This may also be a good option for some businesses.
In the end, I’m happy with the extra Business Pages I created on Facebook because this gives me more options relevant to my own business.
Facebook As A New Bookmarking Tool
The reason why I sat on these new Business Pages for a few weeks was because I was figuring out the best way to use them. And I decided to use 4 of them just like I use the Delicious bookmarking site.
- InternationalBusinessIdeas
- InternationalMarketing
- InternationalSales
- InternationalSocialMedia
Here’s why…
I “follow” a couple hundred blogs on my Google Reader. This is the first thing I do every morning, as I have my morning coffee I check to see what’s in the news. I need to stay current of what’s going on in my industry, it helps me build a better business network. And I also use the Google Reader to stay current on the skills I need to do my job.
So I have a number of folders in the Google Reader. There are days when I’m more interested in one subject than the others and it makes it easy for me to use the Google Reader this way. And of course I have folders for each of the keywords used for my new Business Pages.
So, as I read through these folders, I now share the links to the interesting articles on the corresponding Facebook Business Page.
Facebook As A Business Networking Tool
Of course, I try to interact with fans on all of the Facebook Business Pages. And to do this I consistently use 2 techniques:
- As I share the links, I write an update with a question I’m really interested in and hope others find it interesting too.
- Use the “@” function on Facebook to give a shout out to others and hope the question brings them back as well as appeal to the readers of their feed. Many people keep the settings so my update and link is published on their feed when I shout out to them with thie “@” function.
My hope is that over time this will help me to:
- Connect with others on Facebook interested in these topics
- Cultivate more feedback in the future
- Nurture my smaller business networks
- Better segmentation to understand my audience more
So, at the moment I’m essentially spending the same amount of time I used to spend bookmarking articles, except I’m now using these Facebook Business Pages as networking tools.
Facebook Content To Write A Book
Each of my Facebook Business Pages will slowly become a source of content on these different topics. I find this format more appealing than the collection of bookmarks on Delicious or any of the other social bookmarking platforms. And more networking can be done around these links than on a social bookmarking site. This in turn leads to even more content.
At the end of the year, or maybe sometime next year, there’ll be enough research and content to sit down and put a report or an ebook or even a book together.
How Are You Using Facebook For Your Business?
My own prejudices were not a comparison between Facebook and LinkedIn. Mine were more about wasting times on silly games. I would never have been able to come up with this business plan for Facebook if I had kept my prejudices about Facebook. The trigger event for me was seeing my Twitter list for “International Business” in the top results for this keyword and realizing that Facebook vanity URLs would soon be showing up there too.
- Have you had a trigger event to change your perception of how Facebook can help your business?
- How are you using Facebook for business?
- Are you like me and using Facebook to reach an audience based in a different country than yourself?
She is who I turn to when I have questions and you should too"
-- Chris Garrett, co-author of the "Problogger" book
