by Julia D. Stege, MFA
We are all new at this Facebook thing. Even those of us who have been at it for a year or more find that the face of Facebook keeps changing and so we are constantly learning. The power of this viral medium continues to expand as we watch membership grow to upwards of 350 million.
Facebook is a wonderful place. I love it precisely because I can converse with childhood friends, college buddies and current colleagues all in one place. However, because of the power of the medium, many business owners who want to post marketing messages worry about how their friends will respond. The question many of my clients ask me is, "How can I market myself on Facebook without spamming my friends?"
The good news is that as Facebook becomes a more and more sophisticated medium, there are ways we can effectively market to some of our network and keep it personal (for the most part) on our profile wall. Here are some tips for successfully marketing on Facebook without spamming your friends.
1) Create Friends Lists: One way to separate out your old school chums, your family, your good friends, and your business associates from the expanding network of folks you are networking with is to create "Friends Lists" Lists allow you to sort your friends into categories which you can use to customize your news feed and to message folks in batches. You want to keep your Lists to under 100 because Facebook doesn't let you send in batches of more than 100 at a time. Lists come in especially handy when you want to invite your network to your fan pages and events.
2) Create a Fan Page: The Fan Page is a business profile that you can use to promote your business. Those who "Fan" your page are opting in to hear your business messages. Most internet marketers suggest limiting marketing posts to 3 per day, but if you are posting inspiring quotes and resources, you can post more often. You can message your fans but beware: not all your fans know where to receive your messages. They must click on "Updates" under their inbox to see messages from fan pages. I didn't know that until today and saw about 200 updates unread in my box. Spread the word about your fan page by inviting your friends and posting about it on your wall once or twice a week.
3) Feed Your Blog Through Your Fan Page: The blog feed is a great way to promote your blog on Facebook. However, if you are blogging often and feeding it through your personal profile, you could be bugging your friends with too many posts. That's why I no longer feed my blog through my personal profile and instead feed it through my fan page. Now when I blog, my fan page gets an automatic update, and since I feed my fan page through my Twitter, my Twitter gets updated automatically too.
4) Limit Business Posts on your Personal Profile to Once Per Day: Those of us who have large networks on Facebook sometimes forget that the average Facebooker only has about 150 friends. So if you post too many times in a day, your contacts with fewer friends will see you dominating their news feed. If you are a FB addict and must post several times a day, make sure you are not posting business related news more than once per day, and keep the rest of your posts to personal updates, inspiration and information.
Magical Marketer Julia D. Stege, MFA helps people attract their perfect customers with a unique combination of Law of Attraction, Wildly Attractive WebsitesTM, Branding from the HeartTM, and smart Social Networking strategies. If you're ready to start attracting your perfect customers now, get Julia's free Magical Marketing Toolkit at http://www.magicalmarketingtoolkit.com . WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include the entire article including this bio at the end.
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