The social networking site Facebook is used by more than 150,000,000 million people to share personal information with friends online. With those kinds of numbers, you knew it would be belong until businesses saw the potential. If you're looking to tap the marketing potential of Facebook, you can create free Facebook Business pages—leveraging Facebook business options can provide a new channel for you to interact with your customers At the same time these pages, called Public Profiles, can also help you acquire new customers as your Facebook fans spread the word about your business to their friends.
Getting Started: Get your Business on Facebook
To get started, you need to visit the Facebook Advertising page. Here you will find tabs to access the following business options:
How to Publish a Facebook Business Page
The best way to start is with creating a Page for your business. Those who have created a personal Facebook profile will find the process pretty simple, but the step-by-step form pages will also make creating a Business Page painless for those new to Facebook.
You will need to have basic business information ready before creating the page -- decide on a page name and find any images you want to upload. Remember that your company logo is best for the profile picture. When you create the page you will need to include a description of your Web site, product, brand or company.
With this information handy, simply choose one of three categories for your business: Local Business (and the industry), Brand or Product, or choose if this will be a Page for a public band, artist or other public figure. Once you select a category you are required to enter the business name. When you submit this information you will then see a Business Page that shares some resemblance to personal profile pages on Facebook.
On a side note, Facebook completed implementing changes to the Facebook business pages that will make the page look exactly user profiles
In Step 2, you'll want to upload your business logo, provide information about your business, contact information, hour of operation (if you have a retail or local office), and a general description that describes your business. As you add more details about your business you can view the changes live on the page you are creating. This is all you need to publish a basic Business Page on Facebook.
Customize Applications and Business Details
On your Facebook Business Page you will see applications that you can include on the page you have just created. When viewing your Business Page, there is an Edit Page link on the top right. Here you can customize all options from a single admin screen.
In the previous step we took care of the profile picture, basic and detailed information boxes. Now, you will need to customize the applications that you want to use. Each Application has a small edit option by the title, letting you remove any of the available applications or customize the application to your liking.
The basic Facebook Applications for Business pages:
The last option you will need to use is the Settings area. This is where you edit country restrictions, place age restrictions and change the published status of your business page. When you are happy with the way your Business page looks, you click the Publish this page link.
Tracking and Gathering Business Page Fans
Within 48 hours of publishing your page, you'll be able to access 'Insights', which is Facebook collected data about how your business page is being used. Here you can track pageviews, number of fans, removed fans, wall posts, discussion topics, reviews, photo views, and more.
After you have successfully created a Business Page you can link to it from your own Web site, e-mail campaigns, or encourage your own personal Facebook friends to become a fan of your page. Remember, when a personal friend becomes a new fan, that message is displayed as a notification to all of your friend's friends. Similar to word-of-mouth marketing, this is a great way to bring Facebook users to your new Business page.
This article originally appeared on EcommerceGuide.com. You can read the full article, which includes details on Facebook Advertising, here.
One of the fastest ways to build backlinks is to register on social media sites with high PageRank: Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ecademy, Twitter etc. These sites allow you to set up a user profile with information about you and your company, including a link to your website. The only catch is that not all of these sites' links are 'do-follow' - which means your site will not always receive the 'link juice'.
If you place a link to a web page in your Twitter post, keep in mind that all of Twitter's outbound links are 'no-follow'. Google and Yahoo do not pass the Trust or PageRank power through the 'no-follow' links. Thus Twittering has limited value for your site.
However, such links do have some value. In May 2009, we witnessed the launch of the Topsy site, a technology that transforms Twitter links into a searchable database. Topsy makes it possible for users to search for information (relevancy is determined based on the number of re-tweets). So, any Twitter link now has a chance to be found and followed by Topsy visitors. Remember, increased traffic is the main goal!
Is it possible to get permanent links from social bookmarks? Well, yes and no. Most social bookmarking sites will retain your bookmark until it's popular. But as your bookmark loses popularity over time, it will be moved into the archives. Ideally, a permanent link should stay on the same page with approximately the same PR forever, but in reality, most social bookmarking websites remove links after some time.
Nevertheless, social bookmarking sites are valuable for other reasons. If you have a quality article that becomes popular on social bookmarking sites, people will link to that article in their blogs, and post 'do-follow' links on forums.
You can search the Web for the keywords 'do-follow social bookmarking sites' to find the latest lists. Networkers have also created services like socialposter.com or socialmarker.com for automatic submission to bookmarking sites.
Blog commenting is probably the most popular - and in many cases, most irritating (because of spammers) - technique of getting permanent links.
The Google PageRank algorithm implies that the more outbound links there are on a page, the less authority or power this page can pass to each of those links. That's because the page's PR is distributed evenly between the outbound links. If a webmaster wants to add an outbound link, but doesn't want Google to follow that link or for PR power to be passed on to the linked page, then that webmaster has to add the 'nofollow' attribute to the link. Many bloggers do so to prevent their PR from flowing to the pages cited by commenters. However, this practice is no longer encouraged by Google.
A few weeks ago Matt Cutts blogged about a change in the PR algorithm concerning Google's approach to passing PageRank through the links with the 'nofollow' attribute. Although no PageRank and anchor texts are passed through such links, they are also counted when sharing the outgoing 'link juice'. The only difference is that it's neither passed to the linked site nor kept on the page. This means Google disapproves of the practice of using the rel=nofollow attribute for the purpose of not sharing PageRank.
If you own a blog, setting up the 'nofollow' attribute to all comments means conserving your blog's 'link juice' and getting fewer comments. The 'do-follow' principle can lead to more spam, but it's a good way to attract webmasters to your site. On the other hand, if you are a webmaster trying to obtain more links by commenting on blogs, don't rely solely on this method of link popularity improvement. Use a combination of methods, including the time-proven ways of press releases, articles and site submissions to relevant lists and directories, and the newer techniques for site promotion in social media.
