subject: How Small Business Can Use Facebook to Grow Their Business in Just 15 Minutes a Day [print this page] If you are a small business owner and you are not using Facebook to grow your business, shame on you!
If you think Facebook is just a place where your kids go online to chat, watch videos and play games then prepare to be shocked. According to Alexa.com a website analytics and Demographics Company Facebook is the 2 most visitor website on the entire in World Wide Web.
Just to help you put that in to picture have a look at some of these statics*:
Over 400 Million users and growing
Two-thirds of comScore's U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore's Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook
There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
5 billion pieces of content were shared on Facebook per week during February
It seem like almost everyone and their dog is on Facebook and for very good reason, Facebook has developed a platform that is viral in nature, which means when someone "likes" or shares your content Facebook then tells all of their friends and their friends that they 'liked' or shared a piece of content and them the ball starts rolling.
The easiest way for a small business to start tapping into the huge viral marketing potential of Facebook is to 1. Create a Page 2. Add people of influence to your profile 3. Create content that gets shared.
1. Create a 'Like' Page - These are pages Facebook allow you to create based around almost any topic you like. In this case it would be your business page with your business logo to help promote your brand.
The advantages of a 'like' page is that when people 'like' your page Facebook will then tell all the friends of that person that they 'like' your page. Also you can have as many people 'like' you page as you can get as compared to your personal profile page you can only have a maximum of 5000 friends.
It is a good idea to hire a graphic designer to create a welcome page with an autoresponder integrated in it, this way your page stands out from the rest and most importantly allows you to capture names and emails from the people who visit or 'like' you page.
2. Adding People Of Influence - You cannot add friends to your business page however you can add and invite people to your personal profile. However this is often where many people go wrong, you don't want to just add a whole bunch or random people, it is not about quantity, it is about quality. The people you want to add are people of influence which are people who have 2000 - 5000 friends and have mutual friends to yourself, the quality of your initial friend will determine a lot of success in the long run.
Once you have added people of influence to your profile page you then want to invite them to 'like' your business page.
3. Create Content That Gets Shared - This is really the key, what we have found that the best content that gets shared, commented and liked the most is positive and uplifting material, the great thing is that it doesn't have to be your own content you might share a news story that is related to your market or a video from YouTube.
Some great ways to add some more power to this is to see what topics are trending by going to Google Trends. When you share your content it is also a good idea to tag people of influence by adding an @ sign before the person's name, by doing this Facebook will share this with all the friends on that persons list.
This should get you started, you don't need to spend hours doing this, just 15 - 20 minutes a day, try updating your status and posting some content 2 times a day, one in the morning and one in the evening and let Facebook do all the heavy lifting for you.
