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10 Ways to Use Your Personal Facebook Profile for Business

By Katie Lance

Are you wondering how to use your personal Facebook profile for your business?

One of the reasons Facebook is effective is the personal connection you can make with people.

In this article I’ll show you 10 ways you can use your personal Facebook profile to impact your business.

Why My Personal Facebook Profile?

Your Facebook profile and Facebook business page can work together today.

On one hand, it’s important for a company to have a professional Facebook business page that’s in line with the company’s messaging, target audience and branding.

But the way you use your Facebook personal profile can also play a role in the success of social media for your business, and this is often overlooked.

First remember that according to Facebook’s Terms of Service, you’re not allowed to use your personal profile strictly for business.

You can't use your Facebook personal profile strictly for business.

However, there are many ways you can leverage the activities in your personal profile to benefit your business and build relationships with current and past customers.

That being said, you may decide to keep your professional and personal lives and social media activities separate.

But as we connect and keep in touch in ways that were impossible before, our personal and professional personas blend together today. So you may consider this separation is no longer realistic for your social media marketing.

When you open up and allow some of your personality to blend into the conversations you have with your professional contacts, you can gain trust and respect from your clients and customers. And you can do this on your Facebook profile.

Here are 10 ways to leverage your personal Facebook profile for business.

#1: Allow Follows to Your Personal Profile

The Follow function allows people to see all of your public updates without you having to accept them as a friend and see their updates in your news feed.

Connect with anyone on Facebook with the Follow function.

After you turn on the Follow option in your settings, you’ll want to pay attention to the privacy settings in the posts you share on your personal profile. When you post a status update to your profile, you can choose to make it visible to Friends, to any lists you have set up or to Public.

Use this feature to filter updates about your family to Friends, and updates about your business or things that you’re comfortable sharing publicly to Public. Your privacy stays intact and your industry content remains highly visible.

When posting to Facebook, choose your audience.

The other great thing about this feature is that anyone you don’t accept as a friend automatically becomes a follower, so you can quickly and easily build up a big audience with little effort.

You can quickly amass a large number of followers.

#2: Celebrate Moments

How do you share about your business or company without talking about it in an annoying way? Celebrate moments.

You’re sure to have amazing moments at your company that are awesome to share, a fun Friday afternoon BBQ, a promotion for someone on the team or the addition of an exciting new feature or widget to your product or service.

The way that you talk about these things is key.

This isn’t a press release, and this isn’t your company business page. This is your personal Facebook page, so use language and tone that’s in line with who you are and your personality.

Check into company events or post a fun photo. Share something exciting, funny or behind-the-scenes, just as you’d share a moment that happened with your family or friends.

Checking into a company event on Facebook is a great way to connect with people personally.

#3: Catch People Doing Something Right

Use your Facebook personal profile to publicly recognize and congratulate a colleague on a job promotion, a career move or just for doing an incredible job. When you post the status update, make sure to tag the person.

Depending on the context, you may want to post the update publicly or within a private company group. People crave recognition, and what better forum to recognize someone than in a group with their peers!

Recognize your peers publicly. Make sure to tag them!

#4: Use Graph Search to Reach Influencers

With the new Graph Search, you have the ability to expand your network andconnect with people who are influencers in your world. Perhaps you want to reach out to someone at another company, a potential client or customer or even a journalist.

In Graph Search, type: “Friends of friends who work for (company)”.

Use Graph Search to expand your network.

Leveraging the power of friends of friends is still in its infancy in the social media world, but in real life we’ve been doing this for years. Ask your friends and colleagues to introduce you to second- and third-tier connections.

Now with Graph Search, you can easily see whom you’re connected to via friends of friends and then reach out to them to see if they would be so kind as to introduce you to each other in a private message.

#5: Tell Your Story

When your personal profile becomes more focused on what you’re excited and passionate about, it’s natural to include a small number of posts about your company. It’s a great opportunity to tell the story of what it feels like to love what you do or where you work!

These posts provide a great opportunity to include a tag for anyone in the post who’s appropriate and to use relevant hashtags that are now searchable, so your post is seen by a wider audience.

Tell the story of why you love what you do.

#6: Tag Your Company Photos

While you can’t tag people in a photo on your company Facebook business page, you can tag people you’re personally friends with. You can also revive the life of an old photo post by tagging it, which brings it back into the news feed.

When you tag someone, they receive a notification, it goes onto their timeline and, depending on their settings, it may also get into their news feed. This widens the number of people who see the post, thereby increasing likes and engagement for your page.

Make sure you tag responsibly and only tag people who are in the photo.

Tag photos posted on your Facebook business page.

#7: Leave Facebook Voice Messages

One of the recent upgrades to Facebook private messages is the addition ofFacebook voice messages. This easy-to-use feature is often overlooked.

Simply go to your Messages using either the Facebook mobile app or the Facebook Messenger mobile app and record a message of any length.

Reach out and send someone a personal voice greeting for a birthday or any other occasion. It’s a little thing that most people still don’t know about, so it’s a great way to surprise colleagues, customers or clients to let them know you’re thinking about them.

Facebook voice messages are a great way to connect with people.

#8: Give a Facebook Gift

People are sharing more than ever before on social networks. Are you paying attention to what’s happening with your key clients, customers and contacts? Did one of them recently get married? Receive a job promotion? Have a baby?

Facebook Gifts make it easy to surprise them with a thoughtful and unexpected gift. Simply choose the gift, pick the recipient, fill out a card and add your credit card information. Then, the recipient gets a notification that they received a gift, accepts it and fills out their mailing address. It’s that simple!

Facebook gifts are a great way to surprise and delight customers, clients and colleagues.

You can spend $5, $100 or more to send a Starbucks card to a coffee addict, adonation to someone’s favorite charity, a nice bottle of wine or even some yummy treats.

Facebook Gifts let you give to charities as well as send physical gifts.

#9: Find More Intel on the People You Want to Work With

Before you pick up the phone or send an email to a potential client or job applicant, do you Google them? Do you Google their Facebook profile?

It’s one thing to see their professional experience on LinkedIn, but it’s another to see what they post publicly on Facebook—to see who they are as a person. View your customers’ Facebook presence to help you get to know them and learn how to build a rapport with them.

You can search for someone on Facebook using Facebook Graph Search, but I’ve found Google searches to be more effective.

Google someone to find him or her on Facebook.

#10: Set Up Facebook Lists

I saved my favorite tip for last. One of the most important things you can do to leverage your personal profile for business is to set up custom lists.

I recommend you set up a list for current customers and clients whom you’re connected to on Facebook, and remember to set up a list for potential customers and clients.

Now, instead of seeing posts from the hundreds of people you’re connected to, yousee the people who are most relevant to your business. This makes it easy tocomment on, like and share any of their content that resonates with you. But it must happen from your personal profile for it to feel and be authentic.

Look at your lists on a daily basis to keep in touch with important people.

Make it a point to look at these lists every day. This is where you see people share their ups and downs, their family, their vacations, their favorite restaurants and the things that make them tick.

Engage with them. Every like, comment and share adds up because relationships are built with small interactions over the course of time. Connect with them through a post, a Facebook voice message, a Facebook gift or even an old-fashioned phone call to build a long-term relationship.

Over to You

Instead of approaching your Facebook updates randomly, put a plan in place andconnect with people intentionally on your Facebook profile.

Start thinking beyond the status update and take advantage of the enormous opportunities to leverage your personal profile for business to build stronger relationships with your professional contacts.

What do you think? How you are leveraging your personal profile to build your business? 

Five Killer Marketing And Distribution Strategies For Your App

By Gideon Kimbrell 

Your app is not alone. Right now, there are more than 1 million apps in the App Store, vying for users’ attention in nearly every category.

Building a great product isn’t enough to make your app the next Angry Birds, and Apple AAPL +0.85% knows it. Just last month, it introduced a “Best New Updates” section to improve the discoverability of apps long after their initial release. But to create a sustainable app, you need to build in solid marketing and distribution strategies to get your app into the hands of the people who need it most.

Take Everpix, for example. When the photo storage company closed its doors, it came as a total surprise to users. It was an excellent product that sorted photos with ease and stored an unlimited number of images for a small yearly fee.

Everpix had the potential to overturn companies like Dropbox and Flickr, but it made one major mistake: It put all of its budget into product development, leaving little money to sustain the company as it tried to grow its user base. While it seems unfair, the fact is a great product isn’t enough to succeed in the app marketplace. It’s important to strike a healthy balance between development and marketing to ensure sustainability.

Grow Users and Keep the Lights On

Here are five strategies to capitalize on the marketing and distribution of your new app:

1. Release early and release often. You may have heard this refrain before, but it’s vital for growing your user base and attracting investors’ attention. Release core features, then leverage communities such as Hacker News and Product Hunt to grab early adopters before building out the kitchen sink. Look at it this way: If you don’t have a user base, how can you be sure you’re building something people want?
2. Find your niche. You can differentiate your app in a crowded market in two ways: Introduce features that no one else has, or target a specific niche. These strategies aren’t mutually exclusive. Take QUAD, for instance — yet another entrant in the crowded mobile messaging market. QUAD focused on its unique ability to message more than 50 people and has heavily marketed its app to college groups like fraternities and sororities that have a real need for a bulk messaging system. By doing so, it’s enabled itself to live alongside other messaging juggernauts like WhatsApp and GroupMe, rather than compete with them.
3. Be exclusive. Nowadays, it seems like everyone uses Spotify, but it wasn’t long ago that the company was just starting out in the U.S. and only available by invitation. While Spotify used invitations to make it easier to scale in a new country, it also had the added benefit of creating buzz around this exclusive new app. By capitalizing on word-of-mouth marketing, Spotify helped itself stand out in an arena that companies like Rdio and Rhapsody had been occupying for years.
4. Optimize for the App Store. Much like the need to optimize your website for search engines, it’s important to make sure your app has the right keywords in its title and description so users can find you. It sounds minor, but if your app doesn’t come up when users type relevant keywords into the search bar, then it might as well not exist. That’s why app design and development companies like Fueled have started making App Store optimization an integral part of their development process.
5. Build in social calls to action. Social word of mouth is one of the best ways to grow your user base. Build in social sharing so users can brag about what they’ve just accomplished, whether that’s leveling up in a game or logging miles in a running app.

It’s easy to assume your app can become the next Snapchat as long as you build a solid product, but what makes that app successful isn’t the fact that it exists — it’s the efficiencies it creates. By focusing on marketing strategies alongside product development, you can create an app that not only makes life better for your users, but also makes a profit for your startup.

Top 10 Benefits of a Facebook Business Page

1.  Increased Exposure to Potential Customers

1.19 BILLION USERS.

Need I say more?

If your business can’t find new customers on Facebook, maybe you should rethink your line of work.

2.  Gather More Leads

Just having people Like your page isn’t enough to provide yourself with a long-term, sustainable business. Sure you can make a good living short-term off just using your Facebook page.

But what if Facebook does actually disappear one day?

If you haven’t made a connection with your followers outside of Facebook, then you’ll be in trouble.

That’s why smart businesses gather leads in the form of email addresses — so they can contact their community outside of Facebook.

Most do this through contests, giveaways & newsletters — and it’s a proven system.

But you also need to be careful how you use your leads.

For example, don’t hammer fans with daily emails peddling affiliate products & other junk — unless that’s what they signed up for.

Email them consistently once or twice a week with helpful information that also leads them to your website — where they hopefully will become customers.

3.  Lower Your Marketing Expenses

Starting a Facebook business page costs you exactly $0.

Sure, you may pay a graphic artist to design a profile picture & cover photo — but that’s not a necessity.

Simply using photographs you take of your business will work — and in some cases that’s better than a creative image from a designer.

My point is that getting rolling with a page costs you nothing until you start paying for ads to get page Likes, boosting posts & running Sponsored Stories — all of which you should be doing with your page.

Facebook ads are relatively inexpensive when compared to traditional print, radio or TV ads — and are 1,000x more targeted.

Just last week I started a page called Fans of Bigfoot — the creature not the monster truck. I started it for fun, but to also test ads & monetization tactics.

Plus, I have a slight Bigfoot addiction/fascination.

Check out my result after running Page Like Ads for just over 3 days:

(The duration isn’t accurate. I stopped the ad on January 1).

Yes, I got more than 1,400 Likes & only spent $34! That’s 2 cents per Like!

And now the page has grown by an additional 600 Likes organically because of the engagement from those 1,400 paid fans.

Can every page find new Likes for 2 cents each?

Maybe not, but by targeting your ads to people interested in your page’s topic, you can definitely keep costs low.

4.  Reach a Targeted Audience

This is carry over from #3 — and it’s super important.

Just because there are 1.19 billion Facebook users, it doesn’t mean they all want to Like your page.

In fact, I wouldn’t want all of them to Like my page — because only a small percentage of them would actually engage with my posts.

As shown in my example above, I was able to get inexpensive Likes by targeting my ads.

I targeted people who already had an interest in Bigfoot — almost guaranteeing that many of them will give my page a Like.

Same is true for your page & business.

If you’re a local business, direct your ads to target customers within a 10-15 mile radius. The ads might cost you more, but the Likes & potential customers are laser targeted.

If you run an ad on TV, during say an airing of “Seinfeld”, you’d be hard pressed to know with certainty whether your ad targeted the right kinds of people for your business.

With Facebook ads, you can be certain — if you target the ad correctly.

5.  Use Facebook Insights

I’ve admitted countless times that I’m not a numbers guy — I just don’t get my jollies by digging through stats.

But I love the new Facebook Insights provided on Facebook business pages.

Why?

Because they’re easy to understand — even for non-technical people like me. And they provide great information for business owners.

Taking a quick look at the insights of my new Bigfoot page, I see:

• How many page Likes I have
• The Reach of my posts & page (take a look at that Reach & tell me Reach is dead!)
• Engagement of the page
• Post Performance… and more

You can dig around & find out how specific posts are performing, the demographics of your fans, etc.

And as Jon Loomer would point out, you can download your insights to really dive in deep.  But you don’t have to — and most of you don’t need to worry about that.

The results provided are usually sufficient.

Compare this to running an ad in your local paper. Are you given any such stats as to how many people visited your store/website based on the ad?

No!

6.  Build Brand Loyalty

Besides being a place to build a customer base & sell products, a Facebook business page can do wonders for helping you build brand loyalty.

What exactly does that mean?

Well, if you consistently provide valuable & entertaining content, your followers will stay loyal — even when you make mistakes.

These days, people look online to find businesses to buy from — and they predominately search social media.

If your followers see you being active & responsive, they’re much more likely to do business with you than a company with no Facebook presence or a poorly run page.

Today, for example, I delivered a bounce house to a family for a birthday party for their son. I have a bounce house business through Space Walk — which I use to test Facebook ads.

Her exact words to me were:

I decided to rent from you because I’m on Facebook more than anything else & I see your page consistently posting about the business & being responsive. Plus you have pictures of your units for me to look at before renting. And I can do it from my phone!

I only started the Facebook page for the bounce house company 2 months ago, but I already have brand loyalty above & beyond my competitors — businesses that have been working in my area for more than a decade!

Guess what? They aren’t active on Facebook.

I am!

7.  Increase Your Web Traffic

Smart Facebook page owners use their pages to drive traffic to their websites.

If all you’re doing on Facebook is getting engagement on your posts, then you’re really just an entertainer — not a MARKETER.

So start using link posts to drive traffic to your site.

The great thing about link posts is Facebook now generates a full-width thumbnail image if your website makes one available.

Because they draw more attention, these wider images are more likely to get clicked.

This example from Starbucks looks like a photo post, but is actually a link. Clicking the photo takes you to the CNN article.

Posting links to your website is an essential part of any Facebook content strategy.

On the Post Planner page, you’ll notice we post links to blog posts 2-3 times per day & mix in 2-3 light-hearted posts to get people talking.

The Likes, comments & shares are lower on the link posts — and that’s fine — because our goal is to drive traffic with those posts, not necessarily get engagement on Facebook.

Let’s look at these Google Analytics for the Post Planner website:

The stats above are from Dec. 2 through Jan. 2.

As you can see, our #4 and #5 traffic source are Facebook — which represent roughly 15% of our web traffic.

I should also point out that our newsletter drives almost as much traffic — showing why you must gather emails!

Bottom line — having a Facebook page will greatly increase your web traffic if you use the right posting strategies.

8.  Boost SEO

The topic of SEO & Facebook gets debated quite a bit.

Some argue that the information in the About section of a business page is scraped & thus searchable by Google.

It’s hard to accurately verify or dispute this claim.

I’ve tried searching with various keywords for our page & do not find results related to Post Planner’s Facebook page.

But when someone searches for “Post Planner” — our Facebook page shows up on page 1 of the Google search results.

I believe the more ways people can find you the better!

9.  Be Mobile Ready

The vast majority of Facebook users are accessing the site via their mobile devices — many of them only with a mobile device.

As this trend grows — it becomes more & more important for your business to have a presence on Facebook.

The great thing about a Facebook page is Facebook does the heavy lifting for you! — optimizing your page for both desktop & mobile devices.

The exception are the custom apps (tabs) on your page that are seen on the desktop but not on mobile devices (unless you supply the mobile friendly link created by an app provider like ShortStack).

When people view your Facebook page on a mobile device it shows users:

• Hours of operation
• Address
• Reviews
• Phone number to call directly from the Facebook mobile app

Below is a screenshot from my Galaxy S3 showing the business page for my favorite sushi restaurant — Fuji’s Steakhouse.

Tapping “More” results in a 2nd image — which lets me call the business.

10.  Spy on Your Competition!

An interesting new feature on Facebook pages lets businesses spy on competitors.

Now this doesn’t mean you can look over their shoulders & check out sales or results from their ads — but it’s a great way to see how others in your area & niche are growing on Facebook.

Just above your cover photo you should see something like the image below:

Click “+ Add 5 Pages” and you’ll be taken to a lightbox. I did this via the local business pagefor Hornets’ Nest — my wife’s baking business:

Facebook makes suggestions based on competition in my area in my same (or a similar) niche. I choose those pages by clicking “Watch Page” or search for pages in the search box.

Facebook lets you select more than 5 if you want — and it should look like this when you’re done:

After clicking “Done” the original image shown above your cover photo is replaced with a box showing the Like count of the competitor’s pages & how much that count has increased this week:

Why is this useful?

If you look at the Pages to Watch & see a page has exploded & gained lots of new Likes, you can visit that page to see what they’re doing right.

Perhaps a post had huge success & you can copy what they are doing on your page to gain more Likes.

This may not give you a ton of insight, but sometimes just a little motivation can cause you to break bad habits on Facebook & improve your posting & advertising.

After all, no company wants a competitor beating them to Likes!

Are you convinced?

Hopefully these 10 benefits have convinced you that having a Facebook business page is an absolute no-brainer.

I personally can’t imagine running a business and NOT having a Facebook page.

by Scott Ayres