Facebook 101
The basics to know before joining the popular social media site, including tips on setting up your account, privacy, and helpful applications.
The basics to know before joining the popular social media site, including tips on setting up your account, privacy, and helpful applications.
If you aren’t on Facebook already, there’s a good chance you will be soon. Whether it’s your kids, neighbors, or friends, someone has probably encouraged you to sign up, set up a profile, and start “social networking.”
Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, are becoming more popular and one of the first places people go when they get on the Internet. These sites offer a plethora of “social” features, including e-mail, photo sharing, and chat.
Facebook, the king of the hill, is the number one social networking site. There are more than 220 million active users with about half a million people joining every day. Facebook increased its U.S. market share from 55.15 percent in August to 58.59 percent in September, according to Hitwise.
There is so much to do and learn on Facebook that it can’t all be covered adequately in one column. We’ll focus on just the fundamentals and provide an overview of what can be done with Facebook today. The next two installments will focus on the basics of successful fan pages and how to market your business on Facebook.
Setting up Facebook and Privacy
Setting up Facebook is easy and straightforward. After creating your account, set up your account settings and create a profile. Within the account settings, you can control who can see your information and what they can see.
Start with less and open it up more as you feel comfortable. Privacy is an important factor here and you need to know how to protect yourself. Check out Facebook’s privacy policy and this update to the privacy setting.
Next is your profile. Most of this information is self-explanatory. Remember, don’t fill in information about yourself if you don’t want people to see it.
For your picture, I recommend a close face shot. This allows people to help recognize you better. Consider this as your personal brand. People will see this image and associate it with you and your correspondence. Your picture will say a lot about you consider what you’re communicating when people see your image.
For more information on setting up Facebook, check out this tutorial. You need to set up a free account first. This covers a lot of the basics with nice examples, videos, and interactive slides.
What Can You Do With Facebook?
Facebook is like a large database of people who are using it for different reasons, but mainly as a communication tool. Applications like photo albums, games, gifts, and others enhance your Facebook experience.
This leads us into next week’s topic on how to create a successful fan page for you business. Until then, please post any useful resources or links that helped you learn your way around Facebook. To get you started, here are some useful resources:
Why Does Facebook Matter to Marketers?
With Microsoft recently partnering with Facebook to integrate Facebook and Twitter updates into Bing search results, this opens the door for more real-time search results. It is likely that Google will also partner with Facebook in the near future. So having an understanding of Facebook (and Twitter) can open up new ways for search marketers to reach their audiences and brand themselves.
Facebook also presents a unique marketing opportunity for businesses with Facebook Business Pages. As more people participate with social media sites, marketers are learning that these sites are where people are learning more about products, services, business, etc. Like most social media sites, marketing on Facebook has a viral effect.
Here are some benefits for using Facebook:
Meet Ron Jones at SES Chicago on December 7-11, 2009.