While I don’t think Facebook is the best place to promote my business, I think it makes sense for many of my small business clients, particularly those with consumer products.

Consider these statistics:

• If Facebook were a country, it would be the 4th largest in the world!
• There are 300 million users of Facebook, who spend 2.6 Billion minutes using Facebook every single day.

Can you really afford to ignore this community?

This article from the Web Worker Daily by Meryl Evans has eight simple and practical tips you can apply to make Facebook more productive for your business.   Many of her comments apply to other social media outlets as well.

She suggests

• Use your full name
• Fill out your profile as completely as possible.
• Choose the right profile photo
• Link to your blog.
• Think twice about linking to Twitter
• Put your most important business information on your profile home page
• Use appropriate privacy settings for your profile information
• Take advantage of privacy settings to limit access on a per-user basis.

To her list, I would add:

• Create a strategy – If you are using Facebook for business, then approach it like any other marketing communication.  While the medium is more informal, you are still creating a business impression, so think about how personal you want to be.