Are you sick and tired of receiving friend requests from John & Son Builders or Tony's Accountants? Or even worse, have you set up a fake profile for your business and then tried to become friends with every Tom, Dick and Harry on the internet?
If you have, you are missing a trick or two, but most importantly of all you could be damaging your business name and credibility. As we have reported previously, the number of UK businesses using social media as a business generation tool is growing at a rapid rate - so it worth putting in a little time and effort to get your social profile correct.
Here's a quick guide to how you can set up a page for your business from your own personal profile without giving access to your personal profile - after all, your new client probably doesn't want to see the aftermath of THAT PARTY!.
A Page gives you a way to maintain a professional presence on Facebook, while keeping your personal profile separate. When creating a Page, use your business name and please remember a Page name CANNOT be changed after you reach more than 100 "likes." Creating Pages gives you the following benefits over creating a fake user:
Your Facebook Page can serve as another news channel, where you can post details information, news and knowledge from your business, but you can also link your followers directly to content on your website or to news articles and features on secondary news portals such as Your Business eZine. These external articles give your business great referrals and awareness.
Ask questions, encourage feedback, and use the wisdom & knowledge of the crowd. Pages enable you to not only have a dialogue with your community around the content you're producing, but also enlist them in the process for crowdsourcing.
You see companies with these fake profiles soliciting and begging for friends you have to wonder how many of their so called "friends" interact with them and share their information and what you don't know is how many of them have just hidden you from their news feeds. With a Facebook page users choose to 'Like' & follow you if they are interested in what you are doing, if they become un-interested, they can "unlike", and you see these changes in your weekly stats updates.
So when you're using Facebook for your business think Page not Profile because 10 interested fans is better than a 1,000 none interactive "fake friends".
It's time for you and your business to create a Business Page on Facebook.
Once you have gained 25 followers, you can have a nice, short and neat Facebook address to market your business, such as facebook.com/yourcompanyname in our case it's facebook.com/iawhq which is an easier way to direct traffic to your Facebook page.
We hope that this article helps you and we'll be posting regular features with a few social media hints and tips on Your Business eZine.
