Introduction

social networks have become increasingly popular especially Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

People uses the internet with the ability to communicate other people in real time.

Nowadays these social networks come in all different shapes, sizes, and specialties.

Flickr – a social network with photo in mind. Twitter – send short message in real time.Youtube – upload your video and share with others.

There are many small specialized social networks. Twit2Fit – to encourage people stay in fit.

Social networks enable normal and regular individual to build their own community. In that way, you can build up your business by interacting with your potential customers or prospects.

There are many ways you can increase your business volume with help of social networks. If you were a writer you could promote your book online before it hit on the bookshelf. Health products, wines, books and jewelry are a few amongst others can be marketed with help of social networks.

Companies’ helpdesk can interact with customers by using social networks instead of phone lines.

As you also know the 44th American President election used social networks to do their campaign.

Facebook, with more than 400 millions of users, is the largest social network and it becomes increasingly popular amongst all ages of people.

Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder and CEO of Facebook from NY,is the richest person under 25 in the world. The first version of Facebook was launched in 2004. He also created “Hot or Not” and FaceMash.

Facebook in detail

If you want to get familiar with Facebook interface, you should look around and click everything to see what happens. Believe me, you won’t destroy anything by clicking around.

First thing first, you should edit your profile and upload a picture of yourself to show who you are.

You don’t have to fill all information if you don’t want. Just put the essential information that you may think people are interested.

Now, it’s time to find friends you know. Find your friends, business partners, interesting people or classmates. You can use Yahoo or Gmail services to help you find your friends. You can even import windows Live Buddies or AOL AIM members. You can also find friends to share  common interests.

There is a search function you can use. Most people need you to identify yourself before they add you as a friend. They use the request friend function. When your network becomes bigger Facebook provides you with friend suggestions based on mutual friends you may share.

Upload photo albums to spice up your profile. Uploading photos  is easy with Facebook uploading service. You can also upload video by using webcam or other types of video you have on your hard drive.  Uploading video can take some time and you should keep the video short if you want people to watch it.

Update your status what you’re up to, what you’re thinking.  You may have a link, video or photo that you want to share with your friends. You can update your status a few times a day or only a few times a week. It’s all up to you.

You can also use mobile version of Facebook. It’s now quite common using BlackBerry or Android phone to connect Facebook.

Live chat with your friends is also available in Facebook. You can also play free games developed by third party. Once you log into Facebook, you are directed to the homepage where real-time news feed of what your friends share on Facebook. You can filter it if you find the news stream is overwhelming. There are also widgets along the right sidebar. Facebook displays any requests from others that you need to take action.  A new enhancement of FriendFeed feature that allows users to comment on or ‘like’ what others are posting. This increased engagement between user.

Privacy setting was another enhancement introduced at the end of June, 2009. You can customize your privacy as you like.

Pages and Groups – you can build, find or be part of communities built around products, brands, celebrities or just anything you can think of.

Notes – This feature is where you can share your life with your friends through written entries. Notes allow you to add in the RSS feed from your external blog.

Friends Tab – you can segment your friends into different lists. Your buddies may not necessary to share  information with your professional contacts.

Inbox tab – It’s Facebook internal email system.

Setting tab – that’s where you control everything to do with yoru Facebook account.

Facebook: Personal or Professional?

For most of us see Facebook as a personal social network. LinkedIn is more like a business networking. You can have resume, get recommendation and some other business activities on LinkedIn.  Many people don’t want to blend their private lives with professional lives. That’s understandable. Other people see their private lives can develop into a professional relationship.

After all, we prefer to do business with our friends. We trust our friends and hope our friends trust us. We wound never want to do anything against our friends that might disappoint them. We tend to work harder when we do business with friends.

This blending of personal and professional also helps to develop a strong community, real friends and interesting conversations.

How do we develop a Corporate Facebook Presence?

Developing a presence on Facebook provides you the opportunity to bubble up your fans and activate them with a community in which they can interact with one another and with your company. If you are looking for potential customers, fans or prospects you have to find them where they hang out.  Yes, you can still have your corporate website and drive the traffic to your site. But, Facebook is the place where you can find most of your customers or prospects.

When creating a corporate Facebook you usually use a company name. Employees from the same company should use the company’s name as a standard . It allows users to search for you based on a company search.

First, you need to create a Facebook Page.

Facebook Pages -Corporate can create a page to share all information with other Facebook users.

Steps to create your Facebook Page.

• Claim your Facebook Page – This is the first step of creating a Facebook Page. Scroll down to the bottom and in the left corner, you notice a link says ‘Create a Page for My Business’. Clik on it to start the process. You provide the type of business, the name of your organization and at last to confirm that you have authorization to create the Page.
• Configure settings – just go through the settings and apply appropriate changes.
• Upload your logo – use your corporate logo as your default profile picture.
• Add the Notes tab – if your company has a blog, you can pull in the RSS feed through the Notes feature.
• Upload photos – upload pictures related to your company.
• Upload videos – client testimonials, product demos or interviews and other video related to your company.
• Set up the Event tab – set up your events here. If you have eventbrite service it can create a Facebook event directly from evenbrite.
• Explore applications – there are many applications to help customize your Facebook Page such as OpenTable and Zagat Ratings that you could integrate. You can also upload your slide decks to Slideshare.net and then integrate their Facebook application on your page. Twitter can also integrate with Facebook. Flickr, Poll Daddy and YouTube services can also be integrated with your page. There are thousands other options that can help you to customize your page. Use FBML to tweak and customize your Facebook Page.
• Activate the Discussions tab – It’s a great way to start conversations, provide information and interact with your customers or prospects.
• Publish your Page – finally, show your Page to your customers.

Secondly, create a easy to remember URL and to promote your Facebook Page.

Promote your facebook page in your email signature. You can also promote your Facebook Page on Twitter. Don’t  spam your twitter followers. Use Facebook to promote your page is another way.

Email marketing or show off the various social networks that you’re active in, including your Facebook Page. Add a Fan Box to your website. The Fan Box can allow people to fan your Facebook Page directly from your website or blog. Facebook Ads and google Adwords are other ways to promote your Facebook page.

You can use Facebook Groups to communicate with your customers or employees both internally or externally.  You can set up Facebook Group with three different levels of access.

• Open – Anyone can join
• Closed – You must request to join and it has to be approved by administrator
• Secret – You must be invited by the group

So, what do I choose? Group or Page?

Generally, organization, celebrity, politician and other public figure are preferably to use Facebook Page. Groups can be used as public or private forum.

You may start a Group to invite selected customers into for feedback purposes.  By using Facebook Group or Page you have to maintain your community.

Post something from time to time to keep the community alive.

How do we do to keep the community alive?

An example is to have a contest or sweepstakes. You can also share some amount of content in your community.

You can also create specific and interesting content , upload photo and video to share with your Facebook users.

The most important is simply to engage with your community’s users. Update your status often. But, not all positive comments are posted in your community. If there is any

bad comment posted in your community you may just delete it. The definition of bad comment like violent, overly disruptive or racial discrimination should be cleared out from your comments.

Facebook Connect is a tool with many features. The most common use of Facebook Connect is for commenting. This function allows users to sign in

with  Facebook credentials to post comments on a blog or website. You can also share stories or articles by using Facebook Connect.

Recent Friend Activity is an another feature of Facebook Connect. You can see what your friends have commented on, uploaded and shared that they interacted with the website.

Social filtering in Facebook Connect can filter the most relevant to their Facebook community. There are a lot of websites or forums need to log in and Facebook Connect can provide a single sign on function

to minimize sign in procedures. Use live feed and Personalized Experience feature to spice up your community.

What’s next? Marketing your Page with Facebook Ad.

Facebook Ad is quite similar to Google AdWords. You won’t take much time to learn how to use the Facebook Ad.

But, Facebook Ad is approved by Facebook and there are something we should keep in mind with your ad.

Use normal words otherwise it could look like spammy. Use proper grammar and spelling. State clear with ad text and don’t use deceptive

discounts and offers. Use relevant images to your ad. Target to the right group of people and read the Facebook guidelines about the ad rules.

Use simple sentence structures and proper language. Try to eliminate symbols and numbers in place of words.

Designing the ad is the first step of Facebook ad creation.

• Keep it simple, not too wordy
• Strong call to action message
• Use image. It tells more than thousand words
• Target to prospects with right filters
• Create a campaign and set your pricing
• Consider the daily budget, timeline
• Two payment alternatives, CPM(Click pay for impressions) or CPC (Click pay for clicks)
• Review your ad and finally submit it
• Lastly, analyzing performance.Check your campaign status, bid,type (CPC or CPM),CTR(Click through rate), Avg.CPM and Amount spent

Summary – why we use the Facebook Ad? Product launches, webinars, recruitment, branding/awareness, event marketing and social campaign.

Facebook Apps

More than 45,000 application are available to Facebook. It’s increasing everyday. Zynga is one of the most popular gaming companies

on Facebook. People spreads Facebook Apps via Wall or notification. You can search and find applications through Application Menu.

When you found the application you want you install it and adjust the application’s settings. You can manage your applications from the Application Menu.

Furthermore, you can design and develop your own applications. Doing this you need to install the Developer Application.

To start creating your first application you need to complete the Application Configuration Form. After spending time to configure the settings you need to add codes to your application and then submit it to the

Application Directory.

Privacy Concern

There are multiple levels of privacy in Facebook.

• Sharing of personal information
• How to properly configure the privacy settings
• Terms of Services and Privacy policy
• The combination of those above how it affects the marketing strategy

If you are professional and you want to keep your private life for yourself you can actually have three options to choose from.

• A single profile that combines personal and professional
• Two different Facebook profiles, one personal and one professional
• Keep Facebook only personal and not mixing work into it.

Now, what about the Facebook Pages privacy. There is a setting option that you can restrict people from certain countries, ages and whether the Page should be published.

Developing Facebook marketing strategy

In order to develop Facebook marketing strategy you need to know why you use Facebook for your business. Building a Facebook community is to generate conversations, drive awareness or increase your fan base.

You use Facebook to market new product or service. Using Facebook tools for promotion of your product or service is a efficient way to reach the market in real time.

Advertising strategy on Facebook is a more straight forward and static way to reach your targeted prospects and customers.

Now, creating a Facebook community is a easy part of the whole process. You just create a Facebook account and then to set up a Facebook Page. As I mentioned before you can create a Page or a Group.

You then can start to invite people to your community. You can send message through other networks. Also, you can add your Facebook Page to email signatures, business cards and other areas where you can provide contact information.

Promote your services or products through upcoming webinar by creating event and posting to your personal wall. Upload photos and video related to your products or services to your Page or Group.

Advertising strategy is quite similar to promotion strategy. Upcoming webinar and advertise product launch and other offline event to encourage people to subscribe your Page or Group. Use Facebook Insights to measure your campaign progress.

Hubspot, an inbound marketing software that allows you to track your online marketing.