Facebook Initiation

For the week ending 5/14/2011, Facebook ranks first in both most website visits per week in all categories and top social media site. It handily beats its next competitor in its category by over 40% with a share of 64%! (Reference: Hitwise.)

Kent and I established our presence for Eclectic Verve on Facebook and other social media channels to enable us to easily interact with our fans. As small business owners, we have the opportunity to fulfill a lot of different roles – some that we’re able to draw upon our knowledge and expertise to perform and other roles that require additional training, research and outside consultation. With the proliferation of social media, we’re excited to collaborate with our fans. Just as I like to help someone solve a problem within my areas of expertise, I’m hopeful that our fans will help us solve quandaries outside our knowledge areas, as those issues arise.

We also want to share new knowledge we gain in the social media realm in an effort to help others who might be on a similar journey – or who might find the information interesting. To that end, following are a couple things we’ve learned about Facebook that we wanted to share:

An individual creates a “profile” on Facebook. A business should setup a “Page”, sometimes also referred to as a “Fan Page”.  The two formats have similarities, but also many differences. I have not achieved expert status on this topic, so I will just share a couple comparisons.

Similarity:
An individual profile can “like” a business Page as can a Page like a Page. However, the process is different. For an individual to “like” a Page, all the individual needs to do is click the button at the top of the page.

For a business to like another business using their business’ Fan Page persona, one of the Page’s administrators clicks on the link on the left side bar, “Add to My Page’s Favorites”.

Do you have any guidance to share regarding FaceBook? What do you think of our Fan Page for Eclectic Verve?