Facebook Marketing using Profile Pages

As I mentioned in the Introduction to Facebook Marketing, your profile page is the center of everything on Facebook and because of this, you should have a plan when you begin designing it.

Picking a Name / Email:

When looking at Facebook as a marketing tool for your business, there is a tendancy to promote your company name, instead of being a real person. Unfortunately this is NOT a good idea for Facebook, or really for most social networks.

Facebook even has a filter that will reject some aliases that it thinks may be non-personal emails. For instance, I tried creating a profile for a client using info@<domain.com> and Facebook rejected that.

At first I was upset, but realized that of course it makes more sense to appear to be an actual person ... after all, who wants to hang out at the mall with a corporate mascot instead of a person who might be a nice guy or girl.

Because of this, you should absolutely register your profile page as a person, even if it might be ghost managed by someone else.

Connecting Facebook to Twiter:

If you are not familiar with Twitter, I'll cover that in another article, but in a nutshell, Twitter offers a very easy way to communicate effectively to a large number of people - it also connects nicely to Facebook, so all of your Facebook friends can see what you are doing.

What you are doing could include new articles on your company blog, a new product, a new product review, new media coverage, or even a call for people to digg a news story or vote for your company in a poll somewhere.

Create Your Bio:

Again, while the tendancy is to create something strictly corp. your Facebook bio should be designed to give the impression that you are a real person with real interests.

Despite the fact that you should make the bio personal, you should refrain from being too casual ... treat it like you are sending a company representative to a user group or a fan club, because this profile DOES represent the company.

Links to your company website:

In my experience, people do click on these links, and they are follow-able by search engines, so if this page gains prominance, it could become a strong link back to your main website.

Post Media Stories or Related Items:

Your profile page is a great place to post links to stories about your company, or even related content about your industry that might be interesting.

Remember, your relationship with Facebook friends isn't just a marketing relationship ... if it isn't fun or if you keep sending too much advertising junk to them, the relationship will sour. Plus, you don't want to overwhelm your friends because you will want them to visit your website to learn more about a new product release when it is time, or vote for your news stories on digg etc.