Find us on Facebook is increasingly used by businesses instead of a website address

Facebook claims over 800 million users (if it was a country it would be the world’s third largest).  This is up from 500 million in July 2010. Around 30 million of these are in the UK.

Over 350 million of people ie almost half use Facebook through a mobile device[1], at least some of the time.

It’s quite difficult to identify how many Facebook Pages are claimed by businesses but it’s safe to say the number is growing fast. Facebook is much more business to consumer focused than B2B. If you’re selling B2B I would recommend you do other marketing before putting time and effort into Facebook.

It’s free to set up a Facebook Page and there are some nice features which you can use such as creating a questionnaire to foster engagement or emailing up to 5000 people with encouragement to be a fan of your page.

When people become ‘fans’ the ‘like’ button shows next to your brand on their page. Facebook Pages are publicly available to find via search engines but to use them and get the most functionality out of them you need to join Facebook and ‘like’ them.

Dog kennel company Park Bench is a company which is using Facebook in a way well-designed to keep people interested and to get more followers. Because Facebook Pages are publicly available we can search for Park Bench in Google and find its Facebook presence on the first page of results.

We’ve all heard of Facebook and if we’re not users ourselves, then we have friends or family who are. Facebook is just one of the Web 2.0 or social media that have exploded onto the web in the last five years or so and we increasingly hear and see messages such as ‘search for for Kiss FM on Facebook and Twitter’.

What do you think the social web means?

The social web covers self-published content (images, documents, videos etc), the use of shared and tagged information (eg adding tags to a photograph such as where it was shot or which people are in the photograph), community building and content discovery (eg ‘pointers’ to website addresses for a BBC News item or a YouTube video). Some of the best known social media and those with the largest user bases are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Other social media with slightly different aims and use are ‘location-based services’ such as Foursquare and Google Places which allow people with mobile devices such as smartphones or iPads to see which organisations or places are geographically close to them and also to add review information or simply to gain contact details and see a map. Blogs also form an important part of social media and, in my view, are either set to replace traditional websites (many people are using blogs instead of websites today, and can be set up to have a look and feel of a standard website) or to run alongside them. Google +  is  a relatively new entrant to the social media sphere and yet to be fully tried and tested and I’m not yet sure of its longevity.

As I’m a user of most of these tools, a search for my name (Catherine Dhanjal) in Google demonstrates how search engine friendly such social media can be. Four of the first five entries are from social media; the sixth result is my own website.