Facing up to Facebook (for business)

Why not face up to Facebook with me?
If you don't already have a page go ahead and follow Step 1 and 2 below - we'll move along together. Post comments here and hopefully we can help each other out along the way.

I was fasincated to read on SimplyZesty's blog post recently that their Facebook (FB) page is their most successful tool for attracting readers to their blog and in turn, new business. The SimplyZesty blog has brought in over 80% of their business as a social media marketing agency.

To quote: "a whopping 18% of our traffic now comes through Facebook. That’s a fifth of our traffic or 200,000 uniques a year that we have coming from Facebook alone."

Impressive stuff. What was really interesting was to read their review of Twitter's usefulness (or lack of): "People obsess with Twitter as a traffic driving tool but here is a little secret for you that will surprise you…..It contributes 1.3% of our overall traffic. That’s tiny!"

Now I follow SimplyZesty on Twitter and they don't actually tweet very much. Certainly not as much as they blog (twice a day - very impressive!) In my opinion, this could help account for the low referral number, rather than Twitter as a channel overall.

However, given that Simply Zesty reached half a million blog readers in just 6 months, we need to pay heed to these statistics!

Having gotten up and running with Twitter (at long last), I'm now giving Facebook a try, and will post here over the next few weeks about how I'm getting on. Ideally, this will help you to set up your own Facebook presence easily and quickly, and start getting a good response. My mistakes will prevent yours, hopefully!


For the moment, here's the report on Phase 1:

I'm a regular enough FB personal user. I have a personal profile which I update every few weeks, and I log on regularly, mostly due a fascination to see what my friends have been up to, and to see photos of their exploits, their kids etc.

So I thought, getting a business FB presence should be quick and easy - as I'm used to using the personal interface the business side should be an easy learning curve.

Boy was I wrong!


Step 1:

Business users need a FB 'page' - a 'profile' is for personal users. There are rules about how to promote your FB page using your personal profile so be careful, and check them out. You risk losing your entire profile if you break the rules. Here's the FB guide to business pages.

I've used the link on the home page to set up a 'page' and this is linked to my personal profile. So now I have a basic page (which looks and feels very similar to my personal profile), complete with my logo, and a link to my blog posts.

However, I found the whole process a little illogicial - shouldn't I set up my page completely separately from my profile? Apparently not.


Step 2:

I want to promote my FB page but to do that I need the short URL: www.facebook.com/knowledgeworks. I'm assuming I will be able to use this to point people directly to my business presence rather than having to go via my personal profile. I don't want my personal profile to be visible to my business connections (as I'm guessing most people wouldn't). Currently I can't find any way to access by business page other than via my profile, so hopefully having a dedicated username will do the trick.

The FB rules say that I need at least 25 friends before they will allocate my username and give me that short URL. So that's the next step. I'll post again once I've reached that 25.


Problems so far

I can't figure out how to log directly in to my Facebook page (I'm currently logging into my profile and accessing it from there). Perhaps this option will appear once I've gotten my username.


More to follow soon.