Promoting your business through Facebook

Chances are you use Facebook all the time for personal use but how do you make it work for your business?  In the past business owners would simply create a new profile for their business and in this fashion it functions identically to the normal account.  Facebook however has just changed their policy that all self promotional material needs to be on a “fan page”.  If they discover anything else they will be disabling user accounts.

In this article I want to go through how you set up this fan page and a quick and easy way to get an amazing inbound link from Facebook.  In future articles I will go through other ways to use Facebook to get more traffic to your website and business.

To create a fan page I would recommend that you have a normal Facebook profile.  Its beyond the scope of this article to go through how that works but here is a tutorial (with pictures and videos) that should get you up to speed if you need it.

Next were going to want to create the fan page, you can do that by going here.   Once the page is created your job is to make it as appealing and attractive to your customers.  You want to create a reason for people to come back instead of just becoming fans and never returning.  You can do this by adding applications to your fan page.  There is an unlimited amount to choose from and if you want something custom made you can find a developer to do that as well (Optimal Web does does this tooJ).

Selective Twitter Status- Already on Twitter?  Install this application to your fan page and end your tweets with #fb and it will automatically update your fan page status.  This is great as it eliminates the need to log in twice.

Social RSS- This nifty application will pull your websites blog and display it right on the homepage of your fan page.  This again is another automated process so you do your social media work on one site and it carries over to others.

Last, I just wanted to touch on how to get a great inbound link from Facebook.  I talked about inbound links in a previous article but to refresh your memory these are links from another website to your website.  Most social media websites don’t give you any credit for links you have on them (they use a no-follow tag that tells the search engine not to count it).  But for whatever reason this method does work (not sure for how long) and it’s a fantastic way to get a link from Facebook.  Below is a quick little tutorial on how to do this.

Notes:  If your unsure how to make a hyper link use the following as a guide: <a href+”websitename”>Hyper Link Text </a>.  Replace websitename with your websites address and Hyper Link Text with whatever you want the click able text to be.

Best Regards,

P.S. If you have any questions please leave them as comments below!

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