Why use Facebook to market your product and services?

Well there are always those impressive statistics, with over a billion users a month on Facebook.  There is also over 2 and a quarter million kiwi's on the biggest social networking platform on the planet.

You can use Facebook to:

• Connect and engage with people (current and potential customers, suppliers and partners)
• Create a community of customers that share and help each other
• Promote your content such as blog posts, white papers and video
• Increase the visibility of your businesses

 Our Top Tips

1. Set up a business page – not a personal profile. Business pages have different controls and rules
2. Add a suitable profile picture and cover image – note: cover images cannot include a call to action such as 'call us' or your contact details.
3. Start connecting with friends, collegues and other people you know, then try and grow your follower base through promoting the value of following you (or liking your page)
4. Post content – pictures and links to video and current news items are popular. People love pictures. If you are posting a link to a blog post on your website that has an image, consider posting the photo direct to Facebook, rather than letting Facebook choose a thumbnail for your
5. Add to your page using Facebook appliations such as discussion boards, video box
6. Promote through ads, competitions etc. Contest are a great way to bring some fun to your page, and can not only increase your likes, but build your email database
7. Use Facebook features such as highlighting and apps to keep your page interesting.
8. Don't just ask people to 'like' you or 'follow you' – why should they? Give them a reason.
9. Focus on your updates (ie your wall) – most people don't actually visit your page more than once, they read updates in their news feed, so adding all kinds of pages can be a waste of time, Focus on sharing content and interacting with comments.

What connecting and engaging people really means is having conversations – not promoting your latest product and asking people to share or comment on it.

It means:

• Commenting on current affairs in your industry and adding expert opinion and insight
• Asking for opinions and input to new products and services
• Sharing customer/fan success stories
• Add photo's of your products, services, customers, suppliers etc

What you CAN'T do

Did you know you can't put a call to action (even 'call us') on your cover photo.Before you use Facebook for marketing your business, especially if you are going to be running competitions - Read the full guidelines

Here are some of the important ones that can trip people up:

• Use sharing – ie 'likes', comments and posts as the basis for a competition. You have to use a custom app or send people to your website. They can like the page in order to participate, but that's about it. You can't notify winers through Facebook either.
• Have a facebook page name that has nothing to do with what the page is about.
• Ads and commercial content are subject to Facebook's Advertising Guidelines and third-party advertisements on pages are prohibited.And ads or sponsored strories can't contain images that have text of price information, contact details or any kind of call to action (this must be text).
• Cover images can't be deceptive or misleading.You can't include calls to action such as 'buy now' or '50% off' or any contact information – even your website address.

If your business involves selling any of the following you're out of luck, because you can't promote them on facebook: weapons or explosives, software that is spy or malware, prescription pharmaceuticals, dating sites with a 'sexual emphasis', tobacco or related paraphernalia. And nothing considered 'adult'.