It would be difficult not to notice the staggering growth of Facebook over the last few months.  Facebook now has 31 million members across the globe and its growth has been so large that some people are talking of it as the new Microsoft.

Where there are members there is the potential to acquire customers, promote your business and drive traffic to your site or eBay listings.  After playing around with Facebook over the last few days, I have come up with a list of ways in which it can be used to your business.

Connect with your business contacts

Chances are that your colleagues and business contacts are on Facebook already.  Invite them to become your friends and join your company network (if you have one - see below). Facebook is a much more friendly and interactive environment than social networks like Linkedin and can be used to form closer bonds with your contacts.

Create a profile for your company

To create a foothold on Facebook, create a profile for your company and a company network. This will allow you to do the following things:

• Invite your business colleagues, and customers to become your friends, creating a facebook network around your business.
• Make postings which will appear in your facebook friends newsfeeds.  These can be about special offers and company news such as job postings.
• List your items in the facebook marketplace (see below)

Promote your Blog 

If you have a company or personal blog, this can be imported into your facebook notes.  Your posting will then appear in your newsfeed and that of your friends.

Facebooks notes settings can be accessed from the applications menu in the LHS of your profile page.

List your items in the marketplace

Facebook has a marketplace where items can be listed for sale.  This is free and could be used promote items for sale on your website or eBay.  Products such as Ztail, make listing items on facebook marketplace easy.

Write an Facebook application

Finally, if you think that there is a real opportunity for your business on Facebook, you should look into developing an application.  Applications can help you develop friends and drive traffic to your website.  Last.fm were one of the first companies to boost their business through a facebook application.

The sign the Facebook is a force to be reckoned with is that there are facebook only businesses developing.  An example of a business which uses facebook is Social flowers, which enables facebook members to send each other flowers.

If you found this post useful, why not buy me a coffee!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 9:35 am and is filed under Social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.