How to Use Facebook for Your Small Business
By: Kandie Day

Leveraging Facebook to generate leads, build site traffic, and even make a little money is every small business owner’s goal. But in most cases, it’s not as simple as getting on once a week for an hour, posting a bunch of ‘interesting’ information, and getting on with your life hoping that the leads will start flowing in. Facebook is a remarkable tool for creating a ‘buzz’ about your small business and inviting new friends to check out your services, but done in the wrong way Facebook can also hurt your overall brand image.

Facebook reaches millions upon millions of people: 500 million to be exact. And 200 million Facebook users are mobile, getting their Facebook fix from their Android, iPhone, and Windows devices. According to the Facebook Press Room, in 2010 the average Facebook user was connected to 80 community pages, groups, and events; created 90 pieces of content each month; and shared more than 30 billion links, news stories, blog posts, and pictures.

Marketing your business on Facebook is no longer a ‘maybe we’ll do it this year.’ It’s nearly a requirement to establish your brand as credible, available, and trending. We’ve put together the top three things you must do on Facebook to be successful, as well as the top three things you absolutely should not do on Facebook. Let’s start with the bad news first and end with the good news.

Top 3 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make on Facebook

1. Over-Posting – I see this mistake made over and over again. In most cases it happens because small business owners have great intentions and want to be active on the social networks, but they either don’t have time throughout the week or they just plain forget. When they do remember, or do have some marketing time, they jump on Facebook, don’t join any conversations or start new ones, but post about five status updates, links and news information in a 15 minute time frame.

2. Not Enough Time – Maybe 15 minutes is all the time that you have for Facebook, and if that’s the case then you might want to consider adding some help to your marketing team. By over-posting, you’re not giving followers a reason to be interested in your company, you’re giving them a reason to “unfriend” you. Take your time with posts. If you do only have 15 minutes on Friday evening to get your Facebook marketing done, put up your most interesting status update in the first minute, spend 12 minutes seeking out new friends and conversations, and in the 15th minute post your second most interesting status update.

3. Unbranding Your Business – Facebook is a great resource for keeping up your small business brand. It’s important to ‘stay in character’ and to ‘stay in business mode’ while spreading information about your business brand. Playing games, talking about personal issues, or posting inappropriate pictures will kill your brand. Spending time on Cityville and Farmville from your Facebook business pages will only show that you’re not professional and not concerned with how your business brand appears to others.

Top 3 Things A Small Business Owner Must Do On Facebook

1. Brand Your Business - Send a clear message with every status update, photo upload, and conversation piece about your brand. For example, a client of Linwright Design happens to be in the field of pain management, and a lot of patients are living with things like RA and fibromyalgia. So we seek to join conversations around these topics, spreading our overall brand message by suggesting information from our website and our branded blogs on these conditions. As a small business owner, your profile picture can be your logo with information about your business, or if you are proud of your team and want to make your brand a bit more personal, it can be a “family” photo of your employees.

2. Seek Out Conversations – Don’t be over-active in ‘fríend requesting’ strangers. For one thing, you will get penalized and possibly even blacklisted from Facebook all together, which is the last thing you want. Seek out conversations in your industry by doing searches with keywords. For example, for our pain management client mentioned above we search keywords ‘fibromyalgia’ (and more) to listen to and join conversations that people are already having about this condition.

(Tip: Go to the search box at the top of your Facebook Page. Enter the keywords that you are searching for. Go to the bottom of the search results where it says “see more results.” Look to the left and click on “posts by everyóne.” This will take you to the world and all conversations on Facebook regarding your industry. Listen to what people are talking about, get ideas for blogs, and join conversations.)

3. Be Consistent – Facebook, as with any other social media platform, is all about consistency. So you only have an hour a week to spend on Facebook? Spread that hour out throughout the entire week. Even 15 minutes every day will help more than one hour in one day. You have to be available to your Facebook friends and you have to be able to monitor your brand. If someone leaves a comment or asks a question, you need to be able to answer those or respond. Even 15 minutes, at the end of your day, every day, will make a small but crucial difference over time.

About The Author
Kandie Day is founder of Linwright Design, specializing in digital development and distribution. Mainly Arizona SEO www.linwrightdesign.com, social media marketing, branded content development, and in-depth analytics.

Since reaching people through traditional media is difficult many forward-thinking marketers are turning increasingly to the internet. There are many Thai language websites here in Thailand but many Thais also use English-language sites to a certain degree. Therefore, many marketers that are trying to reach local audiences for different products have quite a number of options.  YouTube and Google, for example, get large numbers of Thai visitors and there is also a Thai-language versions of Google.

There are also a few Thai-language video sharing sites, although they receive very small amounts of traffic compared to YouTube. So, marketers here are producing content that is in English or Thai and also using tags in both languages to experiment with the effectiveness of tags that are not in English. Since Thais search in both languages this should ultimately prove to be successful.

Marketing companies in Bangkok are also using email marketing as part of their mix although reliable email lists are hard to come by here. However, there are some small lists available that are relatively reliable and there is at least one company that we know of – www.contactbangkok.com – that sends out weekly newsletters to its 40,000-strong database of businesses and you can pay to put an HTML ad inside it.

And, as connection and download speeds become faster here in Thailand, the use of video is becoming more and more important to marketers looking to use the fastest-growing and most effective method of communicating ideas. As mentioned above, there are very few Thai video-sharing sites but the major video-sharing sites in the world are becoming more popular here and traffic is on the rise.

As in other more developed countries, Thailand is also turning to the internet but the progress here has been somewhat slower. With recent technology and infrastructure improvements here, however, that progress should quicken and propel Thailand into the ranks of its more advanced neighbors.

(This article comes from HeBS at www.hospitalityebusiness.com)

Does Expedia believe the hospitality industry has forgotten the tremendous damage done by online wholesale discounters (now called Online Travel Agencies – OTAs) in the period following 9/11? Has the current state of the economy revived hospitality “Stockholm Syndrome” in which the abused (hoteliers) feel such allegiance to their kidnappers (OTAs) that they will accept Expedia’s new anti-industry terms and conditions?

Pro-industry experts at HeBS and elsewhere are extremely concerned that Expedia.com and Hotels.com will effectively take away hoteliers’ rights to manage inventory and rates at their own hotels, destroy channel management and rate parity, and eventually cause a long-term erosion of hotel brand and price integrity in the same manner it did after 9/11 in 2001.

Read more below and in our latest blog posting: “The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Stockholm Syndrome, or a Case of Both?”

Finally, please check out the results of our last Industry Pulse Poll, “Which Mobile Marketing Steps are Most Important in 2009-2010?” Then, click here to participate in our latest one, “Should Hoteliers Take a Bold Stand and Not Allow Expedia to Bully the Industry and Become the De Facto ‘Rate Manager’ of the Hospitality Industry?”

HeBS has heard from many industry sources that recent renewal negotiations with Expedia/Hotels.com have turned cutthroat, with OTAs demanding new terms and conditions that are against everything the hospitality industry stands for: last room availability, guarantees that the best rates are only found on Expedia/Hotels.com, penalties to properties that do not use these sites 100% of the time, etc. These contract renewal “negotiations” have been described to us by some participants as “here are our terms–take it or leave it”-type meetings that “practically lack of any negotiations,” etc.

But what has enabled Expedia to become the market bully? When Priceline eliminated airline ticket booking fees in the spring of 2009, it quickly gained 2% of market share from the OTA industry. Expedia and the rest of the OTAs shortly followed suit. Now, in order to remain competitive and to continue generating revenue, Expedia must increase its profits from the hospitality sector.

As the OTAs fight to survive, they are exploiting the vulnerable hotel industry to do so. Taking advantage of struggling hotels, the OTAs dare to demand increasingly high percentages and implement new fees. And hotels, scared to lose any revenue in a deteriorating economy, oblige.

Expedia is undoubtedly the most predatory of the OTAs. In addition to commanding concessions, it is also pitting competing hotels against each other to see which will provide Expedia with the highest returns in order to retain its “preferred status” with the company. Through these practices, 24- and 48-hour sales, and city-wide sales, Expedia has both convinced the traveling public that it is the last word in traveling and has attempted to set the hospitality industry back eight years.

So what should hotels and hoteliers do? What are HeBS’ recommendations in order to avoid a repeat of 2001 and maintain a robust travel sector? Click here to read more.

Industry Pulse Poll Results

Last month we asked, “Which Mobile Marketing Steps are Most Important in 2009-2010?”

The results were as follows:

1. Launching a mobile site for my hotel—43.4%

2. Creating an opt-in mobile list (M-List) of my customers—17.4%

3. Creating mobile applications (mobile apps)—17.4%

4. Launching mobile advertising (mobile paid search and banners)—8.7%

5. Launching text marketing—8.7%

6. Launching mobile CRM—4.3%

7. Wait and see—it is too early for mobile marketing—0%