So you’ve finally decided that enough “serious” people are using Facebook, that you should take a  look at it too. That was my attitude about a year ago and it was the exact attitude of the insurance agent I spoke with this morning.

At some critical Tipping Point (an excellent book by the way) Facebook became too big for large businesses to ignore, then it was too big for medium-sized business to ignore and now it is arguably too big for the mom-and-pop shop to ignore. The beautiful thing is that Facebook levels the playing field for the mom-and-pops and the big kahuanas. That tips the balance of power toward the smaller entrepreneur that is social media savvy.

Ready to get a quick dose of savvy?

In this blog post I want to focus on branding and perceptions. Remember the comment about the mom-and-pops competing with the big guys? All it really takes to LOOK like a big player in your field is:

  • A professional looking page graphic
  • A couple hundred (or thousand) fans

If you look professional and you have fans then you have ‘social proof’. With so much garbage on the Internet, social proof is becoming more and more critical to your branding and positioning. What you say about yourself takes a backseat to what others have to say about you. On Facebook there are two steps to social proof…A) get fans and B) get fans to say nice things about you. The latter is the equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising, but the former (just having fans) is critically important to your first impression.

I’m sure you have experienced this yourself…you walk into a restaurant with 3 of 45 tables occupied at dinner time. You have formed an immediate opinion about the quality and value delivered by the restaurant without looking at the menu or asking the diners their opinion, right? When you walk into a restaurant with the same 45 tables and a 20 minute wait to get one, you form a more favorable first impression. Again, you did not ASK the diners about the food or the service, the simple fact that the diners are present in the restaurant is the social proof.

See the analogy? When a new person comes to your Facebook business page and sees that you have lots of fans (including names and faces they recognize) they form a favorable first impression and are more likely to look around your page and/or respond to a specific call to action.

OK, so where do you get a professional looking graphic and where do you get fans?

Options for Creating a Professional Facebook Graphic:

  1. Hire a professional designer
  2. Do it yourself (see video below)
  3. Find a tech-savvy family member or friend to do it for you (send this person tot he video below)

Options for Getting Fans on Your Facebook Page

  1. Invite people you know and allow it to build on its own (definitely do this)
  2. Advertise your fan page inside Facebook. Here you are paying for clicks and can target your ideal customer profile very well.
  3. Pay people to become fans – $50 will get you are 1000 fans and make you look like a rockstar (strongly consider doing this). These people probably won’t care about your business, but they will be strong social proof.

The following videos explain each of these parts in more detail and show you exactly how to do it.

This video shows you how to create your own good looking large facebook profile picture (200×600) pixels using only Microsoft powerpoint. You can use the profile picture on your personal pages, fan page or both.

Part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3

Part 3 of 3
This video shows you how to get a Facebook Fan page profile picture professionally created for dirt cheap. It also shows you how you can get up to 15,000 fans on your page for as little as $80. WOW! Here is the link to the website I discuss => Outsource your Facebook Design Tasks

Final Video

TO LEARN EVEN MORE: Clearly I cannot tackle the entire topic of Facebook for Business in one blog post. That’s why I elected to focus on branding via graphics and fan counts. For a detailed review of strategies, the technical details and other ins and outs, I strongly recommend the Facebook for Business eBook by Marc Krisjanus. You could hunt all over the Internet for free articles, tips and ideas to get yourself up and running on Facebook, or you could drop $47 on Marc’s 130 page guidebook. You’ll be able to read the book while commuting, highlight and mark ideas and and share it around the office. It’s a great investment to get yourself started.

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