Facebook can be an effective tool for businesses to connect with customers and build their brand. The document provides several recommendations for how businesses can leverage Facebook, including creating a strategy for engagement, posting content to appear in users' newsfeeds, buying targeted ads, promoting events to leverage viral visibility, creating fan pages for businesses separate from personal profiles, and engaging authentically without hard selling. Resources for using Facebook for business purposes are also provided.

1. FACEBOOK. “Why you and your business should be there!” By Denise Welch, President NewMediaID.Com 760-341-3438 [email_address]

3. What is Facebook? Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you. An online network users join that are organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. Users can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify their friends about themselves. But what about business?

5. Create a Strategy on how to use Facebook for business The number-one reason that people flounder in social networking is that they don’t have a strategy. Some Facebook users add anyone and everyone as their friend on the site and they quickly get overwhelmed. Carefully choose key influencers in your industry and choose your activities strategically.

7. Newsfeed related to your Strategy You can appear in the “feed” of information that reaches your friends in the network by posting photos, videos and comments, and importing your blog posts. This creates a fast-spreading “viral” networking effect and effectively builds your brand.

9. Buying ads for your business Facebook ads appear in the margins of other users’ profile pages. The ads work like Google Adwords and they can convey a precisely targeted message. People click on these ads when they’re on their own profile page and the ads are tremendously effective for raising brand awareness

12. Viral Visibility for your Events When someone RSVPs for your event, that person’s friends can see that they responded and the friends become interested in your event too.

14. Fan Pages for You & Your Business Keep your personal and business contacts separate on Facebook. You can only have one account in your name, but you can have an unlimited amount of “pages” on Facebook for your business or group.

16. No Hard Selling on Facebook There’s a saying about social networks: “When the marketers move in, the members move out.” Be a member, not a marketer.

18. Resources http://www.hubspot.com/archive/facebook-for-business/