Facebook Campaigns and Campaigns on Facebook are new ways to promote your Columbus Ohio business. If you don’t have a presence on facebook, I would encourage you to create one for your business. But John, what’s the most effective way to utilize facebook? That really depends on the type of business you are in. Let me address a few questions that you may have:
Why should I start one? Who should I befriend?
Treat facebook as another email list. As you build your following of friends, you can email them and update them on any happenings or events with your business or product.
By now some of your real life friends will be on facebook. Go ahead and befriend them and possibly befriend employees (depending upon if they feel comfortable) These people will help you build your companies friend list.
But what’s the best way to start? Should you create a facebook profile or a fan page?
This is a tough question to answer. In the summer of 2008, my intern Danny Cox and myself both debated this question when working on internet marketing strategies for athenshub.com. We decided to go with a profile. The reasoning is that it’s more likely that you will appear in a “news feed” section. Sure, when “fan” profiles make updates, you will see an “update” notice on the news feed page but that’s about it.
What kind of exposure did you get by creating a facebook profile?
We would appear on our friends news feed when we were invited and chose to attend people’s events. You can also show up by befriending other people, posting pictures, and posting a status. These are all great ways to create awareness of your company and increase your following of friends.
Another advantage of creating a profile rather than a fan page is that you can join groups. Research groups on facebook and identify which groups would contain your target audience. Athenshub.com is a free classfieds site and in the Summer of 2008 
we were targeting students looking for rentals for the 2009-2010 school year. We wanted to show students that we were a resource to find information on rentals. We did some research on groups and found groups of students that would be looking for rentals. We then joined the group and then emalied the group administrator and asked that they would pass along a message to the group (1000 + members) that the website was a resource for them.
This strategy paid off huge dividends as these admins passed along word to group members via facebook email. We saw large spikes in traffic both on the days the email went out and in days going forward. And there’s nothing better than having the group admin market for you.
These are a few tips to get you started. We plan on doing some more great interactive things with athens hub and for my new coupon website. Happy facebooking!
