Taking a Page Out of
the Ol' (Face)book
02.24.11

My wife recently moved her thriving photography business from our 180±sf guest bedroom to a 1,100+sf loft on Main Street downtown. Prior to that, we had props and furniture, electronics and supplies stuffed into closets and floor space on two floors of our house.

Gaining national notoriety from competition on a recent photography reality show, an appearance on a photography podcast, and features on local & regional wedding blogs, Crystal George Studios needed much more space to entertain clients, prospects, and wedding-industry mixers. (Crystal has now shot weddings in seven states, including ocean-front nuptials on both the Atlantic and Pacific.)

Long before she physically separated her personal space from her professional space, Crystal separated her professional and personal Facebook personae—by creating what Facebook calls a page. While she often markets her talents through her Facebook profile, she has an online storefront where people outside of her personal social network can visit, stretch their legs, and meander through her content. By tagging brides, grooms, and even people from wedding parties in her photos, she constantly finds a stream of new people looking through her work and becoming fans.

I meet many auctioneers and other small business marketers, who are still operating out of the online equivalent of a spare bedroom. Some avoid social media altogether—at their own peril. Others dump a bunch of their business advertising into their personal Facebook streams or ignorantly create Facebook profiles for their businesses instead of Facebook pages.

"What's the big deal?" you might ask. "Facebook is Facebook, isn't it?"

In short: no.

As with many other tools in life, there are right and wrong, efficient and inefficient ways to use tools. Regular Facebook users can tell which companies know how to use Facebook's tools—just by how those businesses interact with their respective audiences. A page comes with a lot of benefits you can't find on a profile, benefits such as:

Personal Space
"Wait. I thought you said a Facebook page creates a partition between your business and your personal space." Yes. And diverting the public to a business page helps that separation. Of the many people you'd welcome into your store or office, there's probably only a fraction of those who you wouldn't invite to your backyard barbecue or want trudging through your living room. You don't want everyone in your online business audience to have access to your personal information and the content intended for your friends. While Facebook allows you to segment the pictures, videos, notes, links, and updates on your profile to specific and varying levels of privacy, it's much safer and more convenient to separate your after-hours life from your nine-to-five one by using a business page.

Professional Voice
Just as having a business location often lends more credibility than solely a home office, a Facebook page can give your company a more corporate image; and it allows you to speak professionally without the distractions of your personal content. For example, it's typically not a good idea to have your child's birthday party pictures interspersed throughout your PowerPoint sales presentations; why would it be different online than it is offline?

The profile status update box answers the question, "What's new with you?" The page status update box answers the question, "What's new with your organization?" Another related benefit: the page allows multiple, authorized people to speak on behalf of your organization. This allows your business to keep interacting with the Facebook public, even when you are not doing so on a personal level; and it allows you to give the responsibility of maintaining a Facebook presence to someone else in your organization—taking it off your plate, if desired.

Virtual Storefront
Facebook has recently updated its page environment to include geographic mapping of your business. Customers, professional peers, and employees who use mobile location services (like Gowalla or Foursquare) can "check in" at your establishment. When they do this, their social streams get a free link's worth of advertising for your business.

Your page also has an area for you to sell your services or products, as well as an area to list your hours of operation and contact information, including your website. Unlike your personal profile, this is an appropriate and beneficial place to advertise your items, services, auctions, and events. One of my clients has even made it possible to bid live online at his auctions from his company's Facebook page.

Analytics
Unlike on the personal profile side, Facebook allows page administrators to see analytics regarding the entire page and even specific posts. It also generates demographic information, such as gender and age of visitors—because Facebook, unlike Google and most other analytics programs, has that information.

Not only can you see these statistics illustrated on graphs, but you can also receive weekly updates via email regarding increases and/or decreases in various kinds of activity on your page. If you implement any ad campaigns, each different ad you submit comes with detailed analytics. You can even compare different ads against each other on the same graphs.

Ad Platform
Facebook's display ad platform works seamlessly with its page infrastructure. You can have the ads link to your website or to your business' Facebook page. With the comparative analytics built into the infrastructure, it's easier to track your Facebook traffic right there in one place.

Content Factory and/or Distribution Center
To keep your name in front of your prospects, you can continually pay for advertising—or create free online content that regularly refreshes their memory of your brand image. Outside of adding sale items and occasional press releases, most small business websites don't change often enough to invite return visits. (I can say that, as my about-to-be-replaced website changes even less often than most of my clients' sites.) Thus, most small companies don't take full advantage of "web 2.0," let alone using social media to do the heavy lifting of their brand building and management.

On your business' Facebook page, though, it's easy to generate new content to stay in front of your market. You can quickly and regularly post links to articles, podcasts, and videos related to your field and/or your product(s). You can write how-to articles and post them as notes. You can display galleries of sale items, sold items, promotional pieces, event photos, etc. And you can gain feedback from and have conversations with your marketplace and make it easier for fans of your work to evangelize on your behalf to their online connections. All this is made easier and free with a Facebook page.

Any entrepreneur or marketer can jump into Facebook and advertise their wares. To increase efficiency and effectiveness, though, pursue your audience from a Facebook page instead of your personal profile.

Stock image of iPhone above purchased from iStockPhoto.com

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