Facebook & Business: How to Get Your Business on Facebook

With this being the first in a series of articles on how to effectively use social media for your business, we thought it would be a good idea to start with the biggest and most prominently used platform out there — Facebook.

Facebook’s usage continues to rise virtually every day. As a matter of fact, on March 13th, 2010, it was announced that Facebook “de-throned” Google as the most visited site on the Internet. With this in mind, it’s critical to create visibility for your company within this realm.

Here are a few staggering statistics about Facebook:

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of Facebook’s active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 60 million status updates posted each day
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events created each month
• More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
• Fan Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
• Average user has 130 friends on the site
• Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
• Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
• Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
• Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
• Average user becomes a fan of 4 Pages each month
• Average user is invited to 3 events per month
• Average user is a member of 13 groups

Source: Facebook Press Room

If you’re not on Facebook at all just yet, there are a couple of routes you can take to get things started:

1. Create a business account. (Learn how here.)

2. Create a personal account and build a fan page for your business.

If you already have a personal Facebook account, then your only alternative is to create a fan page for your business.

There aren’t really that many differences between the functionality of the two styles (business account versus fan page). If you desire to have some separation between your business and your personal life, then the easiest way to create that would be to have your own personal account and then create a fan page for your business. If you’re ready to create your own fan page, we suggest you start here with Facebook’s guide on creating pages. If you want to really spruce up your page, check out this article. It details what is needed in order to customize your page.

Once you’ve successfully staked your claim in Facebook, be it with a business account or a fan page, what’s next? The reasons and methods for using it are growing exponentially every day. It’s a good idea to gather information together first and then create your plan of attack. We have found a great article, 9 Rules of Facebook Promotion Every Business Should Know, which we think provides excellent guidance for establishing an effective presence for your business on Facebook. There are several other good articles that are worth reading through and gleaning helpful information from as well. A couple more that we suggest are:

• 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook
• How to Market Your Business with Facebook

We hope you will find this information useful as you begin your journey into Facebook with your business. It’s an exciting forum for businesses to embrace and looks to be a great way to gain additional, helpful exposure for your products and services. If you come across other helpful articles during your web surfing, please feel free to let us know about them in the comments section below.Additional Information: Please review our introductory article entitled “Five Guidelines for Your Company’s Social Media Presence.”