Facebook No-No's for Small Business People

Facebook can be a fantastic marketing tool for people with small businesses.

You can:

• Create events pages to invite your friends to demonstrations, garage parties, and ask them to forward your invitation to their friends.
• Create a group where you post informative information that's relative to your business, invite people to join it, and generate useful discussions.
• Create a fan page to promote your business, organizations, blog, band, book or cause - essentially anything for which you want to build an audience.
• Update your status with teasers that link to content you've created elsewhere, or offer discounts, free seminars or other promotional freebies.

It also can be a great way to kill your business if you do it wrong.

What you absolutely DO NOT want to do is farm the friend lists of your Facebook friends and spam them with messages promoting your business. There is no greater faux pas when it comes to using any social networking site for business purposes.

I'm a Web content strategist, and Facebook is one of the tools I recommend for promoting Web content, good causes, or small businesses. Facebook has become the defacto publishing platform for countless people who never would have considered blogging, using Twitter, or building a website to talk about themselves, what they're passionate about or their business. It's a great place to create buzz and allow your content or product to accumulate an organic network of supporters or fans.

And for years I've told people that they don't have to hire someone like me to show them how to do any of that – if they have the time to learn how do it themselves. It's not hard to learn - just read the rules of the sites, hang out on them for a while to figure out how the dynamics work, and use a little common sense.

But as people keep saying, sense isn't as common as you might think. Over the last four years I've encountered people who shouldn't be trying to use Facebook for any of those kinds of things without guidance. In almost every instance, they were spamming people they'd never met by farming their friends' friend lists.

Spamming – on a social networking site? What are they thinking?

Let's see: I get an invitation to be the friend of a person I have never met and whom I have no reason to know. We have one friend in common on Facebook. The invitation includes a message that invites me to learn about her workshops/scented candles/hand-made body butter or some such thing, and invites me to join their fan or group page.

Yeah, sure. That's going to make me want to attend her workshop or buy her candles.

Cue the "Wrong" buzzer.

It's OK to ask your Facebook friends to spread the word about your product or service. It's OK to ask *them* to ask their friends if they might be interested in your product/service or fan page.

It's *NOT* OK to spam your friends' Facebook friends.

Facebook strictly prohibits spamming. All you'll do is make sure that people are going to report you to Facebook and get you shut down. And they'll be telling their friends (who might otherwise have considered your service or buying your scented candles) that you're an idiot.

Don't do it.

Negative word of mouth is a business killer - and can kill it FAST in the digital age.

For more on social media marketing, read Social Media for Small Business.