Strategies to effectively use Facebook to build your business

In my last few columns on social media, we've taken a 50,000-foot view of some of the most common features of popular social networking sites. In this column, we'll take a closer look at a specific site to give you the information you need to create the most effective platform for your particular business needs. This month, we look at Facebook:

www.facebook.com.

Facebook is used by millions of people every day for the primary purpose of sharing news, photos, videos and other information. While originally introduced with the individual in mind, businesses have jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as well. For all of its easy-to-use features, Facebook does run into a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg issue when it comes to differentiating between personal accounts and business accounts. It can get a bit tricky, so let me break down the basics:

A business has two options: A Facebook Business Account or a Facebook Page.

Business Accounts: If you already have a personal Facebook account, you are prevented, under Facebook's terms of use, from creating a separate business account, or even upgrading from a personal to a business account. According to Facebook, business accounts are designed for individuals who only want to use the site to administer pages and paid-for ad campaigns. For this reason, business accounts lack the functionality of personal accounts. They have limited access to information on Facebook and are prevented from viewing the profiles of users on the site, or other content on the site that does not live on the pages they personally administer. In addition, business accounts cannot be found in search features, and cannot send or receive friend requests.

Facebook Page: According to John Paul Titlow of ReadWriteBiz, two crucial advantages for businesses of using a Facebook Page are user analytics and easily-embeddable "like" buttons and widgets. With the recently overhauled Facebook Insights, you can view all kinds of useful data about user activity on your page, including how many likes and comments you received each day, demographic breakdowns and much more. This data can be helpful in understanding the characteristics of your customer base, and this data is not available to individual profiles. Unlike personal profiles, pages offer the means to embed a "like" button and other Open Graph plug-ins into your own site. Additionally, keep in mind that on Facebook, individual profiles are limited to 5,000 friends, whereas pages can have unlimited fans. The downside is that if you already have a Facebook account and try to convert "friends" to "fans," you'll have to ask all of your friends to voluntarily make the switch on their own there is no instant conversion.

Of course, many innovating individuals have found ways to customize their personal Facebook pages to make them user-friendly from a business perspective. This is primarily accomplished through use of Facebook's many pages, platforms, applications and features.

You can use Facebook discussion boards, for instance, to solicit user feedback and use Facebook Events, which allows you to let your "fans" RSVP.

Besides accumulating lots of "friends" or "fans" with whom you can communicate, you can use Facebook to share articles, ideas, photos and videos, as well as create events to which you can invite your friends and fans.

As you can see, there are a great many tools Facebook offers to help you customize your account and connect and interact with customers in a way that best suits your particular business needs. Consider dedicating an afternoon to simply clicking through to some of the various features, pages and applications outlined above, and see which ones feel like a good fit for you.

Dave Archer is chief executive officer of Nevada's Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. Contact him through www.NCET.org.