Facebook is primarily for social networking and finding friends and keeping in touch with them through Facebook. There are over four hundred million users of this site with a quarter of them from the US itself.
However, despite the fact that Facebook is a social network, more and more people use it for commercial purposes even though it is not a means of conducting personal business.
There are people who are involved in home-based internet businesses who would greatly benefit if they could tap into the Facebook network to grow their business. But being a social network, these people are shy about using Facebook for profit. Also, if the Facebook account becomes a business tool, there will be little chance to interact with friends and family.
However, with the dramatic increase in the number of people on Facebook, it has become a competitor to Google AdWords in terms of attracting visitors to your site. Facebook is hot on the heels of AdWords and taking a huge chunk of your business away as more and more people have started using Facebook for business purposes.
If you want to use Facebook for business, you can. But there are other ways you can do it if you want to do business and keep in touch with your loved ones. The easiest thing you can do is narrow down the news feed, which will allow people to post to you. This will also allow you to keep your business friends intact. However, this way there will not be much publicity for your business.
To circumvent this problem, you will need to create a Facebook dedicated to your business through your account. A Facebook page will help you promote your product or service. When you start promoting your business you can ask all your friends to become “fans” of your page. Well, there is a difference between a “fan” and a “friend” on Facebook. The advantage of a fan is that when they post something, it will not appear on their main Facebook site and will be covered by any news from their page. It will appear in your newsfeed.
If these are different types of products or services, you can have separate Facebook pages for each of them. This way you can target specific customers for a specific Facebook page and it will be a good way to manage your portfolio of different products.
You can make your Facebook page attractive and informative with text, videos, photos, discussion boards and all the other applications that Facebook offers. You can even have links from your Facebook page to your other web pages or blogs you may have.