Written by james | 09 February 2010
Posted in Social Media

We all now know that Facebook can be a huge source of web traffic, with its 400 million users. We all know somebody that uses Facebook. If you don’t have a Facebook account for your company/business, or are just not doing much with it, you are losing out. There is a big reason why 80,000 sites and businesses use Facebook. A small page and a little time dedicated to it daily, brings back big results.

Consider the average Facebook user; spends about an hour a day on their account, the average number of Facebook friends is 130, and on average joins 24 fan pages per year. This makes Facebook an unbeatable network of people and businesses, and also means it has great advertising potential through capturing interest and the atmosphere to share things with people. This makes Facebook an invaluable tool for marketing, advertising and for business owners and directors.

But it's about how you use your Facebook page, not just having it. The first thing that people tend to do wrong is, when you have established a good amount of fans, use them to spread your fan base out, make them want to, rather than just stacking them up like collectibles. Once you have your fans, interact with them; get them starting discussions and raising interest. You need to provoke them into starting interesting conversations, to want to share your interesting content. To do this, it helps if you have a good relationship with your fans.

A recent study found that there is little relationship between wall posts on a page from a page admin, and total number of fans. However it did find a strong relationship between the total number of fans and other content on the page (videos, links, photos and notes). So content is important, just the less straightforward types of content and not just posting a small snippet of words. I don’t know why, but somehow this will be news that some of you do not know about.

A few little pointers in the light of this would be:

• Participate and involve yourself with fans, and make sure it's routine so people know exactly when to log on to interact with you.
• Ask your fans useful questions, make them think, thus encouraging feedback and fan discussion.
• Host events on your page to pull in interested people, to make fans exited and get fans pulling in new fans purely because of the event.
• Highlight any contributions by fans. This will make them feel good for contributing their views/content, thus making others want to submit opinions/content and encouraging group discussions.
• Go beyond the limitations of plain text. Use videos, pictures, things that give people a clearer view and are more likely to interest them. Include relevant links, and anything else that is relevant and will interest people.
• Integrate all your online accounts and pages with your Facebook page, give people more options to interact with you and to be able to find all of your online content from one place, your Facebook page.
• Don’t use lots of Facebook apps, boxes or games as this will flood your page and your wall with unnecessary, annoying information that nobody wants to see on there.
• Run offline events, meetings or gatherings, and make posts about the time and location, updates, reminders and changes of plan. Many people in your fan list will attend and you will generate new fans through word of mouth. It also gives your fans more to discuss on your page.

The last, but not the least, analytic tools and statistics. You must always pay attention to the Facebook analytics and statistics. This gives you a clear picture of where you stand and the progress you have made. This will also tell you which content type attracts the most comments, views, and fan interaction. Just try all the different content types until you figure out which one is best for your page and your fans. If you have any questions/comments, just click add a comment below, and if you require a response we will get back to you as soon as possible. Happy Facebooking!