How to use Facebook – My Attempt To Unravel Its Mysteries!

Very few people know how to use Facebook properly. It is huge and has great potential for making money online, having more regular users than Google – over half a billion, at the last count!

But only a tiny percentage of internet marketers use FB for their businesses, leaving the field wide open for anybody who understands even Facebook basics like Walls and Fan Pages to get tons of targeted traffic.

Facebook is primarily a social networking medium, aiming to promote one-on-one personal contact within an ever-widening human net. It is not obvious, at first sight, that FB is also a great business promoting medium.

This, therefore, is an introduction to Facebook as a business marketing tool.

Forgive me if I start from the beginning, but Facebook is not laid out very clearly and tends to change itself quite regularly. There is also a shortage of Facebook tutorials and guidance, not helped by the jargon that Facebook uses. So let’s try to unravel the mysteries of this wonderful system!

You need to start with a Facebook account – what a surprise! But, and this is vitally important, you may only have one Facebook account – EVER. Do not be misled into thinking that you need one account for personal stuff and another for your business activities. If you try to have more than one account, even with the best of intentions, you run the risk of being banned for life.

Don’t worry about this, as Facebook lets you do everything under one personal account umbrella. And you need a personal account, NOT a business account, because it is much more flexible for the type of marketing that you will be doing.

I will begin with the personal stuff. Once you have an account you will find yourself with Profile and Home pages. Facebook, having allocated these pages to you, then calls them your Wall (the Profile page) and your News Feed (the Home page). Many people find this confusing, but there we are. You have to learn it.

Your Profile (Wall ) is all about you, with sections for comments, photos and all sorts of personal information that you wish to share with others. I suppose the idea is that you kind of pin these pieces of information to a wall so that everyone can see them. The more the merrier, seems to be the rule.

The News Feed is where all your friends (let’s call them Friends, with a capital F ) post everything they want to share. Now here is the first neat trick. Every time you post a comment, picture or whatever on your Wall it also appears on your News Feed, along with those of your Friends, so they all get to see what you are saying in real time.

It is easy to see how quickly a community of like-minded people can grow, sharing information and data.
With care and sensitivity you can promote things that you are doing and, of course, things that you are selling.

Remember, though, Facebook wants this to be about personal relationships, so avoid anything that could be construed as spam or spamming .

The problem with your Profile is that Facebook limits you to a maximum of 5,000 Friends. It might sound like a lot but you will quickly reach this limit if you are promoting properly. The answer is the Fan Page.

This is a sort of parallel Facebook universe where business can be promoted, with no practical limit. Fan Pages have Fans instead of Friends, and you can use promotional materials. Best of all you can include Opt-in Forms, for many the key ingredient in successful marketing.

There are some technical differences between Profile and Fan Page, perhaps the most obvious being the iFrame. This is a sort of sales or promotional page that you upload to your Fan Page. It is like a page within a page, and needs some care and guidance in its construction to be really effective.

Very few people know about Fan Pages, and even fewer use them properly for marketing purposes. Get to know how and you could have a huge advantage over your competitors.

Facebook has come in for some unjustified criticism on the subject or privacy but, in reality, it should never be an issue.

You have complete control over who sees, or does not see, the information on your Wall. There are categories for No One, Friends, Friends of Friends and Everyone. And Facebook has now introduced an extra Public or Friends control for individual posts.

Facebook has a range of options, much more than you might consider necessary, to let you customize your account exactly the way you want. You can change your settings at any time.

For marketing purposes, I do not have any problems with using the settings recommended by Facebook.

Once you have mastered the Facebook basics you will be able to start the real purpose of your Fan Pages – getting traffic. This is where the great advantage of Facebook comes in.

Let’s say that you post an interesting or useful comment or piece of information. Someone visiting your Fan Pages ‘Likes’ it and decides to share it with his or her ‘Likes ’. Some of them also ‘Like ’ it and share it with their ‘Likes ’ and so on.

Very quickly your post can spread exponentially (going viral) and – another key – it will be going to people likely to be interested in it . Many of these will want to visit the link you will have placed in your post.

Voila! Targeted traffic to your webpage.

My aim, with this quick introduction to Facebook, is to show its potential for internet marketers. It is easy, a little quirky, but very exciting. Many believe that it is the way of the future for making money online.

Who am I to disagree?

Facebook is a rapidly moving site but, nevertheless, I like to have some good reference material to hand for those days when I can't think straight!

These are some books that I recommend for their usefulness and basic information about Facebook.

There is also plenty more detail if you want to dig deeper and understand the inner workings of Facebook.