facebook

Are you a small business owner looking for a cost-effective way to market your business? Has your marketing budget taken a hit during the recession? Do you want to connect with your customers?

Using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks effectively to promote your business can seem difficult. But when you are armed with the knowledge of how to use these new forms of media, you possess the power to harness them to your advantage.

If you set up a Facebook Page for your small business or non-profit, you will eventually have fans begin posting comments to your wall posts or directly to your wall. Of course, that will only happen if you set up your Page correctly to allow fans to post such things. If you haven't, I suggest you read a little bit about how fan interaction influences EdgeRank.

Is your local small business trying to compete with the national big brands? It can seem daunting given their immensely larger marketing budget, but your small business can gain an advantage over the national brand by using social media.

So you've created a Page on Facebook for your business, but it isn't really generating any activity. You might have even had a friend or two ask you how come they never see any posts. You scratch your head and ask yourself the same question.

The most likely culprit: you might not be allowing comments, likes, or your Fans to do anything on your Page. You might be treating it as a bullhorn instead of a conversation. While this isn't the only reason, the information I have to share with you applies to everyone.

If you've set up Twitter and Facebook profiles for your business and have used them for any length of time, you may be getting annoyed at the constant hassle of changing from one service to the next to post the same update or link.  Why not link them together?

It is really easy to do, both the right way and the wrong way.  It might be tempting to just use Twitter's Facebook app so that you can send updates to Twitter from Facebook, but this leaves an ugly fb.me short URL linking back to your Facebook page.  This can get really annoying really fast.