If you're a business, Facebook is the place to be. It has the scale and all-in-one channels.
Let's dig into how Facebook works. The site is weaving new concepts and channels (open graph, social relevance, EdgeRank) in with established channels (search). And understanding this convergence will take your social media effort from a hobby to a real driver of incremental business.
At a high level, it's simple: Just like those pervasive social games you see in your feed (MafiaWars, "the 'Villes," etc.), you can take advantage of viral loops unique to Facebook to build notoriety. And by raising your voice both on and off of Facebook, you will meet new people, convince them you know your stuff, and move them toward a client relationship. Hundreds of millions of people use Facebook as a personal dashboard. And what's the main use case? They look at their newsfeed and navigate through threads.
Facebook is growing up - At this point, it's clear that Facebook's channels work. It's also crystal clear that Facebook wants to clean up its streets. They've systematically clamped down on the communication channels that viral apps use to market themselves.
(Really, a viral communication channel is any means within an app that lets one users request something from lots of their friends at once.) Facbook's theory on clamping down on mass-invite viral channels is that your newsfeed will be filled with relevant, interesting content while precluding noise, which will make Facebook a valuable utility for you forever.
Most people want 500 or a couple thousand fans, and from that pool will acquire clients. To get those fans, one must demonstrate value by posting interesting links, making insightful comments, and engaging with people in appropriate and positive ways.
Facebook loves this small-scale, high-value human interaction. One must add value to the community; The more people who respond, the more your info goes viral. And the more he gets in front of friends of friends, the more his audience develops. Now, let's think about the nuts and bolts of how to get tons of people to join your audience, share you with their friends, and pay you lots of money to buy or sell a house.
"Inside Facebook" Inside Facebook is anything you do on the facebook.com domain. This is where you check your newsfeed, engage with posts, and thread around through profiles trying to find that high school classmate.
"Outside Facebook" is your blog, website, whatever. If you have a presence off of Facebook, as many people do, you need to do a handful of things to support your audience development efforts. Often overlooked, these will help you to prevent potential clients from falling through the cracks:
1. Use "Like" buttons on your website - This is practically old hat by now, but make sure to add a Like button or Like widget to your website, and make sure it's connected to your fan page. When visitors arrive at your site or blog, they can click the button and sign up for the stream of information you create on Facebook. This is the critical action for you to stay top of mind with them and have the opportunity for "shares" among their friends. Using the Like widget, fans can even view on your website which of their friends also have "Liked" you, which is a powerful social endorsement tool that will raise your fan-to-customer conversion rates.
Even better news is that the widget is very easy to install. Facebook generates a blob of code, and you or your Web guru can just pop it in a static portion of your site, such as your header or sidebar.
2. Use a Like button for your blog posts - This is a similarly simple idea, but the distinction from the above Like widget is important. If you have a blog, each post should have a Like button. That allows visitors to Like your individual posts, which will show up in their feeds on Facebook and get you some eyeballs. (The above Like widget signs users up for your content stream, while Like buttons for posts just get them shared.) This is also not difficult to implement.
3. Open Graph markup - Open Graph has gotten less attention since its announcement, but this metadata markup protocol will become important in the coming year as Facebook makes a run at Google with its search product. Facebook search will be an increasingly powerful channel for discovery since it will return social relevance information (who among your friends liked or commented on your keyword) along with the traditional keyword-based search indexing (not coincidentally, courtesy of Microsoft's Bing).
Without getting bogged down in the theory, OG is code you put on your pages to tell Facebook what it is: Is it a page about a movie, or is it a house, or is it a business home page? Among other things, this allows Facebook to properly render your page when someone encounters it in the Facebook search box. Also, if you connect it to your fan page, we suspect that it strengthens your page in search results as well. These tactics ensure you're getting viral juice out from your website visitors.