Facebook is the social networking giant of the day. They currently boast more than 300 million active users. The numbers that kind of userbase generates are staggering. And with everything you can actually do on Facebook—from the basics like chatting and sharing photos to more complex interactions like playing Scrabble with strangers or recruiting people to donate to your favorite charity—it’s no wonder people spend more time on Facebook than any other site on the web.
More than anything, Facebook is a platform to interact with people. It was originally built as a basic social networking site for college students and its primarily purpose is still connecting people. But now it’s a lot more than reconnecting with long lost high school friends and trading comments back and forth.
Much like Twitter, the Facebook experience centers around status updates that your friends see in a constantly updating stream of activity. This stream of updates is important, because it’s the best way for businesses to tap into Facebook. But unlike Twitter, Facebook goes far beyond simple status updates. You can share photos, videos, links and blog posts (or “notes” as Facebook calls them). You can invite friends to events, form groups, post classified ads—even give digital gifts. You can also explore an ever-growing collection of applications that extend the functionality of Facebook and let you do things like catalogue and share your library or rank and review your favorite movies. You can also connect with businesses, celebrities and causes through fan pages that are effectively profiles for non-people and larger than life people.
Why Care?
You need to care about Facebook because that’s where the people are. As much as Twitter is grabbing the headlines, the sheer number of people on Facebook is an order of magnitude higher. A recent MPR article noted that Best Buy had 10,000 followers on Twitter, but 830,000 on Facebook. If you want to connect with people, Facebook is the place to do it.
Signing Up
Getting started on Facebok is pretty simple. Visit the homepage and sign up to create your profile. There is a link to “create a page for a celebrity, band or business,” but if you don’t already have a personal profile Facebook will make you create a profile before you can finish setting up a page. So you might as well set up your personal profile first.
Once your personal profile is set up you can add all sorts of extra information, including your profile picture, membership in various networks, work experience, political views, religious views, family members and more. It can definitely veer into too much information territory, so be sure to think twice about what information you share. You can also check the privacy settings and to adjust what information you’re sharing with strangers (under Settings: Privacy). As you add friends the e-mail notification can be a bit overwhelming, so you might want to dial back the e-mail notifications now (under Settings: Notifications).
In future posts we’ll cover how you can make the most of Facebook for your business.
