Unless you’ve been under a rock these past few years, you probably know about Facebook. If it’s a tool you’ve overlooked in your marketing efforts, you might want to reconsider. Its 500+ million active users share more than 30 billion pieces of content each month. In fact, the average Facebook user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events. If you want to be where the people are, then you need to know how to leverage Facebook to find potential clients, connections and sales.
There are two ways to use Facebook to promote your business – via your own personal account and through Facebook’s Pages feature. In this lesson, I’m going to talk about marketing via your own personal account. I’ll address how to use Facebook Pages in an upcoming post in this series.
When you start to think of Facebook as a business tool, the question of privacy and how much to share with work and personal contacts can become a concern. Most people don’t want to let their boss or clients know “exactly” what they did over the weekend. Lucky for us, Facebook has set up a great way to control exactly what your connections see. You can control just about anything, so you can feel comfortable and secure using your Facebook account as a medium for business, while still saying your hellos to Mom.
Getting this kind of security is achieved through a feature called “lists.” This feature allows you to create lists, similar to Twitter, that you can add your friends to. Then you can go through and create privacy setting based on these lists that will determine who can see what. To get started, use this simple tutorial as a guide.
STEP ONE: Set Up Your Lists
1. Click the Account link on the top right of page. A drop down menu will appear. From there, click the “Edit Friends” link.
2. On the left side of this page you’ll see a list of links. Under the Lists heading, click the “Friends” link.
3. A list of all of your friends will now appear. At the top of this list will be a button that says “Create New List.” Click this to begin creating a new list. These lists allow you to separate your friends and family from work or professional contacts.
4. Once the lists are created, add your contacts to the appropriate list. I like to make sure I keep everyone in just one list so I don’t accidentally expose someone to content I don’t want them to see.
1. Click the Account link on the top right of page. A drop down menu will appear. From click the “Privacy Settings” link.
2. At the bottom of the chart there is a link that says “Customize Settings.” Click this to personalize your settings.
3. You’ll find three areas where you can customize your settings. The first is controlling who sees what you are sharing. The second determines who sees what other people post on your wall or about you. The third handles your contact information. Go through and create your settings. If you want to exclude a list from seeing something, click on the Customize link. Begin typing who you wish to exclude in the “Hide this from” section. You can exclude multiple lists using this feature.
Sometimes you want to post something that is outside your created settings. You can do this with the privacy feature when you post your status updates. Next to the Share button is a lock icon. Click this and you will see a drop down menu. Click on “Customize” to set who you want to exclude your status update from. Just like in the privacy settings, you can also exclude by list.
