Read Part 2 of our series in case you missed it.

Let us pick up where we left off last time. I had just begun examining the Facebook fan pages, and how you can apply them to your business. In particular we discussed the advertising platform. Advertising is just one aspect of these pages that can really drive your business. Let’s discuss the other potential areas of benefit now.

Company Announcements

If you have an important announcement to make, what’s the quickest and easiest way to get that information to your customers and followers? With a Facebook status update of course. Lets say you want to advertise your Holiday trading hours, or you have just launched a new product, or service. In 30 seconds you could have pushed this information to your customers. Anyone who follows you on Facebook will see this message on their home page.

Customer stories

You can write status updates that encourage customers to write back to you. Writing an engaging status update is a good way to start discussions. Once you get some traction with this method, you will soon be cultivating a community around your fan page. The more interactions with your page, the more likely it is that your page will get noticed. You know the rest.

This can also give you some valuable feedback on exactly how you deal and respond with your customer base, or with what you are doing in the market place.

Surveys/competitions

This is one area where having a fan page can really work for you. Coordinating a fan-centric competition is relatively straightforward, and this can be a great way to generate some buzz around your brand. The frameworks are already in place for you, and you just need to know what sort of competition you want to run, and then you can be on your way. The viral nature of sites like Facebook mean that your competition can get large exposure, without you having to spend the earth.

Likewise, conducting a survey can be a great way to improve areas of the business, and encouraging fans to participate in your surveys is as simple as setting up the survey, and posting a status update.

You can also use Facebook Ads to generate interest to either your competition or survey.

Linking to blog

If you’ve just written a great blog post, you’ll want to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. Having sustained readers on your blog is always a desired outcome, and Facebook gives you an opportunity to direct readers to your blog. When you write your post, make sure you follow it up with a succinct and catchy status update attaching the link to the blog. That way your fans will be driven to your blog and hopefully become regular readers.

Instant feedback

This is probably one of the key areas that Social Media can have a real impact on your business. The moment you do something that someone loves or hates, you’re going to hear about it. Having this sort of feedback at your fingertips is something that money can’t buy. We’re moving in to a world where you will be connected with your customer base (and critics) whether you like it or not. You can use this to your advantage.

Hopefully you’re really starting to see the potential for this in your areas of business. If you need any more information or have any questions on just how Facebook can expand your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Next week, we’ll be moving on to Twitter and how you can leverage that platform for your business.

Read Part 1 – What Is Social Media if you missed it.

Sound familiar? It sure does to me.

Each week I read stories and hear push back from companies who aren’t willing to embrace what is sure to be the #1 way to market your business or brand in the coming years. I added a few new blogs to my daily read list and even as a surprise to me, at least half of them were posting on Social media topics as their current posts. If you thought this wasn’t important, please, read on (well, read on even if you do!).

Think about how the entrepreneurs of yesterday (who are well and truly rich and famous today) and how they came to be that way. Names like Oprah & Trump. They have built a solid, personal brand and they built this over a long time. But how did they do it? Pushing themselves into your life, via unescapable mediums. TV, magazines, books, billboards. You name it. And this isn’t cheap. All of these marketing forms cost money, and lots of it.

Some of these big names are catching on and adapting very quickly to the future of marketing and branding, but some won’t. Their methods that worked 10-20-30 years ago were perfect for the time, not the way to do things now. People need to step back and understand this. Stop playing in a dying world.

I offer myself as an example. You’re marketing your product to me? How would I know about it?

• TV – Sorry don’t have free to air TV
• Radio – Sorry, don’t listen to the radio
• Newspaper – Sorry, don’t read the newspaper (oh and my web browser has ad-blocking turned on for all you crazy news sites who think I want a car driving over the top of the article I was trying to read. Yes I can start reading before your adverts load)
• Hmmm…

I’ll tell you how I found out about your product.

• I was looking for a product “X”, so I Googled it and found a couple. Yours had the best online reviews, so I bought it.
• I was interested in a topic, chatted to a friend, and they told me to look into the supplier online.
• Someone I follow on twitter happened to mention getting a copy of your book. I now own it.

This is not an unusual scenario, but I really shouldn’t have to do much more convincing. If you’re running a business and still can’t see that in a couple of years time, there’s going to be limited offline ways to appeal to me, my friends, and everyone else in this world, you need to jump ship now.

So what was the theme there, in how I discovered your product? Community. Community, community, community, community.

I connect with the companies I purchase from via information I seek out on my own terms (which in actual fact is community-driven information), or via encounters with the online community. If you’re not tapped into this now, you’re going to be last in line, and out of business. No question.

But how do you get started when you’ve got no time to research it, or no idea you even needed it until now? Lucky for you I started this series.

Firstly I’m going to discuss Facebook and how that can apply to your business. Facebook is a social network, and social networks are only one aspect of Social Media. Briefly touching on some other types we have: social bookmarking, media sharing, review based, user generated content and blogging.

Getting the most for your business from Facebook

There’s no question that Facebook is an incredibly low-spend way for a company to get their name and brand out onto the Internet. With over 300 million targetable users, it really as one of the biggest opportunities you will ever get.

Firstly you need to have a fan page set up for your business. This only takes a few minutes and means your presence is secured. We can worry about getting all the information entered over time. Once you have a presence what can you do with it?

Firstly you want to share your page with all your Facebook connections. They will become a fan of your page (hopefully) and this has a two-fold effect. One, thanks to changes to Facebook structure, the fact that your connection became a fan, is announced to all their connections. Two, their profile shows your fan page for as long as they remain a fan. This means that any new connections of theirs will be able to see they are a fan of you.

We will craft ways of using your fan page to maximum effect later, but be assured there are many ways to integrate this into your business plan or goals. A fan page makes it incredibly easy to monitor reviews, run surveys, interactive competitions, and spreading news.

The single best part in my mind is the Local targeted advertising. With 10 minutes of effort you can have your brand in front of millions of eyes, for a very low cost. But what if you don’t want your brand exposed to everyone on Facebook? What if your product is so specific that it only applies to women, or perhaps women in their 30’s. Maybe your product applies to 30 year old women in capital cities, or in one city. You get my drift. Being able to segment your advertising market with such ease is probably the single most powerful chance you will have to get your product or brand out there, with minimal spend.

I’m going to wrap it up there and let you digest that for a day or two. Stay tuned for the rest of the series, where I will finish up with Facebook and show you the next piece of the puzzle. Twitter!

Thanks for reading :)

This is the first in a series of posts about how Social Media is changing the way companies all around the world conduct business. It will discuss both the benefits and the pitfalls and how you can ensure you make the right decisions. We’ll reveal company successes and provide you with enough information to make a judgment call for your business.

If you think Facebook is a fad or Twitter is for teenagers, you could be setting yourself up for a nasty surprise down the track. Proactive companies are looking to adopt and leverage these technologies as yet another way to promote their brand and increase market share.

Shouldn’t you be doing the same?

So what will we be covering over the course of these posts? We’ll be going into detail on the various forms of social media, how each one applies to businesses, what combinations are right for your business and sharing some success stories which will hopefully encourage you to jump in and get started. We’ll also be delving into the ever changing area of online advertising and how this fits in the bigger picture of social media. The world is evolving and with it advertising, marketing and brand promotion. Time and time again we see the companies that fail to adapt are the ones left behind. Don’t let that be you!

Now, lets get on with Part 1 – What is Social Media?

Social Media as defined by Wikipedia as “content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies.”

But what does that really mean to businesses like yours? What does that have to do with promoting your business and increasing your loyal customer base? Perhaps it can best be summed up by this short video by CommonCraft.

That video uses a well known situation to demonstrate a few concepts. Specifically the idea of collaboration, sharing of information, and the inclusion of your customers into your business processes.

Before diving in to the various technologies, if you have a spare four minutes I’d recommend taking a look at this video as a quick introduction into just what Social Media is all about. It certainly gives an eye opening insight into the sheer size of what we are looking at.

Frightening numbers? Hopefully you now see it as something you need to delve into, but you just need the guidance to know where to begin. Lets end this first post with a quick run down on some of the more common Social Media websites. In the next few days, I will elaborate on these and present how they could be used in your business. Remember these websites are not the only aspect of Social media, and we will cover that in the next post.

Make sure you tune in.

Facebook – Facebook is a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region.

LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 mainly used for professional networking.

Twitter – Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.

Digg – Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

MySpace – MySpace is a social networking website

YouTube – YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos.

Definitions from Wikipedia.