1. Can you really call people friends when you’ve never really met them? I don’t accept ANY friend requests unless I know a person or they come as a recommendation from someone I trust.  I think in some ways we’ve made it too easy to connect and I am more interested in “real-ationships” than a body count.  Not to mention, people do business with people they trust.  How can you do this if you don’t know them?

2. Does having thousands of followers really matter? I think the idea of building a massive follower list is just like those childish, school popularity contests where those with the most friends wins.  Where are your friends now?  We should be more concerned with building quality friendships over shallow quantity ones.  Plus, using trickery to build your list doesn’t equal qualified leads or good friendships…but maybe that’s just my Gen-X cynicism speaking.

3. Can you honestly keep up with them? Many bloggers or books say the proper etiquette is to friend or follow a person who does the same for you (and can also a magic bean tactic). This is a great theory and very kind, but highly impractical.  You can only keep up with a limited amount of people. And if you are only doing it as a courtesy, doesn’t that cheapen the deal?  I follow people because I care about what they are saying or doing, and at 227, this is very difficult to do!

4. What is the real purpose? I understand the power of reach and that having a large list of people can increase your odds at being heard, but there is a huge difference between earning the right/trust/privilege to be heard (or followed) as compared to marketing tactics to bait you into a relationship.  If your reason is to create true community then it has to be done with authenticity.

5. Isn’t Social Media about getting results? I’ve been reading Social Media Metrics by Jim Stern and it’s challenged me to go back to my old school reasoning of the ROI (Return on Investment) of using the social media apps at our disposal. In the Introduction, Jim states that you must measure the effectiveness of social media and that there are “The Big Three Goals” in business:

• Increasing Revenue,
• Lowering Costs, and
• Improving Customer Satisfaction

He writes, “they are all that matters in the long run.  If the work you do does not result in an uptick in one or more of those Big Three Goals, then you are wasting your time and spinning your wheels.” Stern also talks about how shallow relationships don’t usually generate good ROI. If we take his information as truth, then we must come to understand that the huge social media numbers game really doesn’t help us out and that smaller, authentic communities do.

Bringing it all together…

Many of us know that trusted relationships with our clients, customers, or community will help us with our business or venture.  Most of us, if we are being honest, would admit that we don’t use social media just for the sake of having fun – but for the purpose of business.  If these are all valid statements (and I believe they are) then shooting for a mass influx of friends, followers, or buddies will not benefit us and therefore making the magic beanstalk worthless.

My advice is that you build your following organically or because you are remarkable.  Then your social media numbers will mean something and have real value.

So how do you feel about these thoughts?

That strategy needs to come first. It should drive which tactics you employ and which tactics you don’t touch. The strategy should explain why you use the tactics you do.

A restaurant may opt to use Twitter because sending random updates from a cell phone on the fly is a lot easier than finding time to sit down at a computer and draft a blog post. The tactic is appealing. But strategically finding a quick and easy way to deliver coupons and discounts to an army of fans is what’s important. That’s the goal. Twitter is just the tactic.

A consultant might turn to blogging as a way to capture and broadcast their expertise. The strategy is to employ educational marketing to inform their audience and establish themselves as a voice in the field. Blogging is just one of many tactics that would accomplish this goal (and a particularly good one).

A hip and eclectic music shop might see Facebook as an ideal way to connect with their crowd. The strategy is relational marketing. It relies heavily on the personality of the shop and demands a tactic that’s going to communicate a lot of personality. Facebook would be an ideal tactic to execute that strategy—it’s a perfect place to exude style, opinion and fun.

Before you get too carried away with the latest new tactic, make sure it fits with your overall marketing strategy.

Intel’s Fan Plan is the latest example. They’re giving discounts on Intel laptops to anyone in the Fan Plan for one day only—Monday, Nov. 30, aka Cyber Monday (the biggest online shopping day of the year, in contrast to Black Friday, the biggest in-real-life shopping day of the year). But the catch is that the more people who join the Fan Plan, the greater the discount will be.

It sounds like a win-win, right? Even Fast Company is wondering if this is the future of advertising.

The problem is that it relies on you turning salesperson on your friends to get a better deal. On the plus side you’re scoring a better deal for everybody, so it could be worse, but that subtle little issue remains. Intel is effectively bribing you to tell all your friends about Intel.

I’ve got a better idea: Create a remarkable product that doesn’t require bribery to get people to spread the word. Go ahead and offer a discount. Incentives are great. But don’t make the size of that discount dependent on how many people I tell.

Swedish furniture brand IKEA also got into the mix of manipulating Facebook with a giveaway to promote the opening of a new store. They posted photos of the new IKEA’s showrooms to Facebook and encouraged people to use a popular photo-tagging feature of Facebook. The feature is supposed to be used to identify people in photos. When you’re identified, your friends will be notified and can check out the fun new picture of you. But IKEA encouraged people to tag products in the photo with their name in order to win them. Tag a product and you can win it!

Sounds great. But what you’re really doing is misusing a useful feature and turning it into a commercial. When photos of you pop up in people’s newsfeed on Facebook, they’re paying attention because they care about you, not some product from IKEA. But if you abuse that feature to win a picture frame, you’re wasting your friends’ time. Facebook has even tightened their guidelines on promotions and this sort of strategy could be a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

Social media is quickly growing and maturing, and people are getting tired of being advertised to by their friends and family. People should advertise for you because they like your product, not because they want a better discount. And in the end, that’s just a better pitch. Who am I going to listen to? My friend telling me about a product he uses and loves, or my friend shilling a product he barely knows just to save a few cents?

Facebook has a feature where users can share links and post content into their stream of updates. That shared content will then be seen by their friends and fans. Users can post links directly in Facebook or you can add ‘Share on Facebook’ icons to your site. The application works by visiting the site you’re linking to and grabbing a preview of relevant information, including the title, description and any images embedded into the page.

But sometimes the information shared isn’t always helpful. You can change that by checking out what information Facebook grabs. You can make sure your site has a useful meta description in the header (which is also good practice for search engine optimization). If you have a blog you might consider putting an excerpt of the blog entry in the description. That way the excerpt will show up when someone shares the link on Facebook, as opposed to the general description of your blog. More specific details will be more likely to hook people.

Facebook’s share feature will also grab an image from the shared link and give the user an option of picking the thumbnail that fits best. You can override this by pointing to a specific image. This might be helpful if your logo isn’t an isolated file on your site—you can point to the perfect image. This is also incentive to include relevant images with your blog entries and make sure when people share the links they’re sharing relevant and helpful information.

Visit Facebook and try sharing a few links from your site. Check them out and see how the title, description and thumbnail images come up. If they’re not as good as they could be, considering changing them. After all, there are more than 300 million users on Facebook.

General Strategies
Big picture ideas and strategies for how to make the most of Facebook.

• How to Develop a Facebook Page that Attracts Millions of Fans
• 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page
• Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies

Specific Applications & Tips
More specific lists of applications and tips diving into the nitty-gritty of Facebook fun.

• 30 Apps for Doing Business on Facebook
• 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page
• 5 Ways to Push Twitter Updates to Facebook
• 5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo

More Numbers
Need more convincing Facebook is worth your time?

• Official Facebook Stats
• People Spend 3X More Time on Facebook Than Google
• Online Retailers: 99% Plan to Have Facebook Fan Pages
• YouTube Races to Be #1 … on Facebook

The biggest advantage to advertising on Facebook is the targeting capabilities. We’re talking about a social network here, so that should be a given. You can target for location, age, birthday, gender, keywords, education, workplace, relationship status, relationship interests, language and even connections (i.e., you can target or exclude members of any Facebook group, page or event you manage). That’s a powerful bit of targeting and ensures you can reach your exact audience.

The purchase process works much like Google AdWords where you can bid and compete with other advertisers. You also have the option to pay for clicks or views. With all the tracking capabilities you can quickly see what’s working and what’s not for your advertising goals. Point people to a specific landing page on your website or even a specific tab on your Facebook page (which has proven to be more effective: See ‘Pages and Ads’ under ‘Case Studies’).

You can get started with Facebook advertising here, check out Facebook’s suggested best practices and read up on 10 rules of advertising with Facebook.

1. Setting Up Your Page
Take your time while setting up a Facebook fan page. The category you choose at the very beginning is something you can’t change—unless you want to dump all your fans and start over. Different categories let you display different information (hours, parking and public transit options for a restaurant, mission and products for a website), so choose wisely. This site explains the differences.

Once you’ve picked your category and set up your page you can start adding basic info (most of this information will be in the “Info” tab that isn’t visible until a user clicks on it). You can also add a short bit of copy to the sidebar on your wall, which is an important place to give a basic overview of your business.

Like every other social networking site, your profile photo is an important branding opportunity. Facebook does zoom and crop images when it displays thumbnails, so it can be helpful to properly size your image so any important details aren’t cut out in thumbnails.

Take a look at the settings before you finish and make sure you’re comfortable with the default settings. By default Facebook fan pages are designed to be interactive, which means fans can post content on your wall. This is a great opportunity to hear from your customers, but you’ll probably want to keep an eye on it.

Don’t forget to publish your page when you’re ready to go live.

2. Status Updates
Status updates could be called the heart and soul of Facebook. Much like Twitter, these are the constant stream of updates that show up on the “wall” of a profile. Each user’s homepage shows a flood of status updates from their friends—so you can see what a vital opportunity these updates are to communicate and connect. Each status update can be commented on and “liked,” which gives ample opportunity for feedback.

It’s important to understand the place of status updates. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which means quite a few status updates will come and go on their home page in any given day. The bottom line is that one or two status updates won’t change the world. You need to have consistent and quality updates to connect with people. And it doesn’t hurt to repeat an important update—don’t assume because you posted it once that people saw it (just don’t go overboard either).

Feel free to double up on your status updates. Facebook can automatically publish your updates to Twitter, and a number of applications can import Twitter updates to Facebook (though sorting out the best method can be complicated).

3. Applications
There’s an unending supply of applications to give more utility to your Facebook page. You can add extra tabs that contain unique content and post extra information in the sidebar of your wall. The applications can do things like post your Twitter feed, hold contests, conduct polls, play music and more. Not all of these will tie into your status updates, which means you’ll need to find ways to make sure your fans find them.

One of the standard applications you’ll want is Static FBML, which lets you add basic HTML. It’s very basic (javascript and iframes aren’t allowed), but you can add images and other extras to customize your page.

4. Importing Blog Content
You also have the option of importing blog content to your Facebook page. The easiest approach is to import the RSS feed of your blog using Facebook’s Notes. The upside is that it’s simple and easy, plus users can read and comment on your entire post in Facebook. The downside is that users can read and comment on your entire post in Facebook without ever visiting your blog. Depending on your end goals that may be a problem.

There are also a number of third party applications that will import blogs. Some will display them in boxes on your page, which is less helpful because you’re relying on users to go looking for those boxes. Other applications (like RSS Graffiti) will import the blog content and post it as a status update, which delivers the content directly to your users.

5. Choose Where People Land
One thing you’ll notice is that each fan page has multiple tabs for content. You can add as many as you like and there is an option to change the default tab people first see when they view your page (Edit Page: Wall Settings: Edit). So you could build a custom tab introducing people to your brand instead of just sending them to your wall. Some folks have even experimented with using this functionality to show unique content to non-fans.

6. Communicate
One of the bonuses of the fan page is that you can send updates directly to all your fans (personal profiles can only send a message to a maximum of 20 friends at a time). These updates appear in a special tab in a user’s inbox, which mean they can be easy to miss. But these updates can also be targeted by location, age and gender. That’s a huge bit of demographic targeting courtesy of social networking.

7. Share More Content
Just like a personal profile, a fan page can add all sorts of extra content, like photos, videos, events and more. Default fan pages also come with a discussion board built in. Be sure to take advantage of these extra goodies and post some content, even if it’s just something fun. Make sure something appears on those extra tabs—if you don’t want any content there, consider removing the tabs so users won’t wonder why they’re empty.

8. Get a Custom URL
The first challenge when you launch your Facebook fan page is to secure a custom url. By default the link to each Facebook fan page is pretty ugly. But once you get 100 fans you can add your own custom url (http://www.facebook.com/yournamehere). You just need to cross that magic threshold.

9. Spread the Word
And the best way to cross that threshold to 100 fans is to spread the word. One quick way is to become a fan of your own page. That update will show up in your profile and other folks might see it and check it out. You can also suggest your page to friends and add the page to your favorites. From there you can go beyond Facebook and add a ‘fan box’ to your website that promotes your Facebook page. Consider promoting your Facebook page in other channels like a blog, e-mail newsletter, link on your website, etc. People can’t become a fan on Facebook if they don’t know you’re there.

10. Examples
Finally, it’s always worth checking out a few examples to see how some of the best are doing it. Take a look at some of these major Facebook pages to see what’s working for them:

• U2
• TOMS Shoes
• Apple Students
• Ford
• Mashable

You can also search for your competition and see if they have a presence on Facebook and if so what they’re doing. Also check out these five inspiring examples for more.

Now you can make the most of a Facebook fan page for your business.

Personal Profile
As you might expect, the personal profile on Facebook is primarily for personal interactions. In fact, Facebook frowns on creating personal profiles for businesses, nonprofits and brands (that’s what Fan Pages and Groups are for).

But there are clearly benefits to setting up and using a personal profile on Facebook for your business. One of the primary benefits is networking. Making your business known to your family, friends and colleagues is a no-brainer. Of course you’ll need to be careful: Most people don’t see Facebook as a business networking site (that’s what LinkedIn is for) and will be turned off by aggressive networking. But you should definitely list your business under ‘Work Experience’ and should feel free to mention your business and relevant opportunities in your status updates, notes, photos, videos, etc. You don’t want to overdo it, but if your business is part of who you are, it makes sense to share it on a personal level.

Fan Pages
Facebook offers fan pages for a “celebrity, band or business”—basically any entity that’s not a single person (businesses, nonprofits, websites, bands, sports teams, etc.) as well as personalities that are larger than life. How do you know if you’re larger than life? If you’ll have more than 5,000 friends (or “fans”) then you’ll want a fan page (personal profiles are capped at 5,000 friends).

This is really where most businesses will want to pour their time and effort. Fan pages are set up very much like personal profiles except the basic information is different—and varies depending on what category you select (restaurants can list hours, parking and nearby public transportation; websites cannot). As an added benefit, fan pages have a few extra communication tools, including the ability to update all your fans with targeted messages.

Now you know the difference between personal profiles and fan pages and you know where to invest your time for your business. Next time we’ll cover how to make a fan page work for your business.

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.