There’s a possibility that I’ve made a bad mistake, as my fellow Arrested Development fans would say. I look at Facebook and I see opportunity, as a business person, for every business. I see a way to strengthen relationships with people you do business with.
I see the ability to say yes, I do have time for you, even if my competitors don’t. I see social presence marketing and I’m in the minority. Most people use Facebook to waste time. And that’s great! If I’m going to waste time Anywhere online, it will most likely be on Facebook. It’s perfect for that.
And it’s also the reason that I suddenly have time to waste time in the first place. In my business, you spend about 10 – 25% of your time actually creating products, doing consulting or conducting training. If you want to make any real money though, whether you have an advertising budget or not, you spend 75% or more of your time marketing, until you get to the level where you can hire or outsource most of the leg work.
It’s the secret to making a decent living online for people like me. I outsource my mass marketing efforts like submitting articles, except where I’m on the staff of a publication. But you kind of have to do things like networking yourself.
Facebook helps with both marketing and networking under one roof.
On it, I have almost 250 direct connections. About 10 of them are real-life friends. Another 100 are people I happen to know from the business who are more influential than me that I’m connected to purely to learn from and follow. I want to be the first to know if they are test marketing a product, or have some new secret weapon I can order.
Then there are people who are either colleagues that I make a special point of looking out for, and clients who are special to me beyond the fact that we do business together.
I could easily have several thousand connections on Facebook. I’d just have to ask my opt-in list to do me a favor. And a certain percentage of them would. But it’s not the quantity of friends you have on Facebook. It’s the quality of the connections.
This is why I’m telling you about my numbers. Pay attention to this and you’ll understand what most people who realize Facebook can be used for the social side of business don’t.
Let’s say that half the people I’m connected to log in daily, as half of Facebook audience is reported to do.
Let’s say of those people, I only have strong connections to 100 – of the people who have my news broadcast to them, these are the ones who make a special effort to act on the news they will be updated with when they log into Facebook.
All of those people will get an update about me on a page they visit daily – again we’re only talking about the less than 50% who may decide to do something about my update that day.
(Who, by the way, could opt out of my messages if they wanted to, Of course, they don’t because that’s one of the reasons why they’re connected me in the first place.)
You see, if each one of those people
- shares my link manually,
- has an application installed that does it for them automatically,
- comments on my link, or
- does one of several other things that take them ten seconds or no time at all to consciously support me,
they’ve then also spread my message to the people they are connected with, on average if that’s 100 people, then my message was sent, in a personal way, to 10,000 people, probably that same day. That doesn’t count people who happen upon information that connects the two of us on their profile each day.
Now, here’s the crazy part.
I don’t even have to be logged in to Facebook for this to happen. I doubled the reach of my blog on a newsletter day, and I wasn’t even logged into Facebook to do it.
I didn’t write an email, buy an ad, or even do anything extra that I wouldn’t normally be doing already. And I widened my potential reach by about 10,000 people. Not bad.
Yes, you’re going to have to log in a few times a week for at least 15 minutes to touch base with people if you want to use it to network in a wider circle. But for that kind of free, targeted, opt-in exposure, isn’t it worth it?
Of course, it doesn’t happen this way most of the time. But 86 of my 250+ FB friends are set up to broadcast some of my messages to their profiles automatically, and I do the same for all of them. Another 100 of them get other messages of mine broadcast into their news. And of those 186 friends, most of them have around 200 connections. I wouldn’t care if they had ten if they were willing to be my part-time evangelists.
This is just one of hundreds of tiny little edges I have over my competition on Facebook, just by having a profile, and setting it up to work for me even when I’m not logged in. My message is spreading faster than theirs is. And I’m a click away from some of their clients because they don’t see what I see when I look at Facebook for businesses of all sizes.
At it’s very worst, Facebook can be used as an additional social communication tool.
Even if I hated Facebook I’d use it. I despise talking on the phone — but I cherish the people I can reach with it. Some of my clients can only reach me by Skype. It’s had it’s problems lately, but if a client in Australia wants me to reach them on Skype instead of their cell phone or landline, I’ll use it.
People who are dismissing Facebook and other social media tools as time wasters have dismissed their clientele right into my lap, on more than one occasion.
Literally.
People have said to me, “I was going to ask such and such but they aren’t on Twitter/Facebook/StumbleUpon/blogs/IM” so many times, it’s not even funny anymore.
And my business, which was at a dead stop when I was ill for several months, a business I would have lost had this been 2003, is not just saved, but starting to flourish, largely due to the proper use of social media tools and sites.
And it is for this reason that the competitor inside me nags “Shut up about Facebook already! You stand to lose the upper hand by sharing this information, even if it IS at a price.” When I told my audience about RSS, all my competitors got feeds. When I told my audience about blogging, most of them started blogging too. So even if I profit in the short term, in the long run, I’m leveling the playing field for people who aren’t even in business yet.
Mind boggling if you think about it.
So I sometimes think I should really shut up about this already.
But the side of me that really, really gets what the emergence of social media is about won’t let me….
