The Goodbye Stop -- photo credit: Peter Kaminski
Today, over in the LinkedIn Tampa Bay Business Group discussion, Karen Post wrote about how she’s decided to break up with Facebook for her small business.
Here’s my response to her LinkedIn post:
I agree that a Facebook fan page or group is not the right social networking choice for all (and perhaps many) small businesses. In addition to the time commitments, the privacy issues that have captured headlines in the NYT (See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-privacy.html ), WSJ and other media lately are on many members’ minds. One of my favorite bloggers and authors, Tim Ferris (The 4-Hour Workweek) wrote about his own “Facebook Bankruptcy” and how he handled it with a template letter to his Facebook friends here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/01/06/thank-you-facebook-bankruptcy-and-late-christmas-presents/#more-2564
Before business-owners totally give up on Facebook, I’d suggest you think about ways you can use it as a marketing research tool. One of the lesser-known ways is to use the Facebook advertising creation process (without actually buying an ad in the final step) to learn more about the demographics of Facebook users. You may decide to create targeted ads on Facebook to reach them.You can also use the search functionality to identify groups and fan pages on topics related to your business and find prospects for your products or services. You’d be wise to go ahead and claim your business name on Facebook, even if you don’t plan to do much with your fan page, so that an unauthorized user doesn’t get there first. It’s good to keep monitoring what’s being said about you and your company on Facebook and other social media with simple, automated, free tools such as Google Alerts.
Twitter may be a much more effective approach to participate in the social media. And LinkedIn, of course, is good for B2B businesses especially. We always recommend that SMB owners consider blogging as the hub of their social media efforts. You own your blog, you control the publishing, commenting, and sharing guidelines, and it feeds your organic search marketing (SEO) success.
For time-savings, it’s pretty straight-forward to set up an automated approach in which you post a blog, it’s automatically published as a Note on your Facebook fan page, which automatically creates a Tweet on Twitter, which then updates your status on LinkedIn, and automatically posts your most recent Tweets on your blog. Voila! A content marketing machine! 
You can check out the Latest Tweets scrolling on the home page of my blog to see an example of how this works.
Hope this is helpful to you, too! Remember that your blog posts, Facebook fan page notes, LinkedIn updates, and Twitter posts should reflect your small business personal branding as an expert in your niche.
What do you think? Are you going steady or breaking up with Facebook for your small business?
