It won’t have escaped many people’s notice that there is a behemoth of a site on the interweb called Facebook, furthermore most savvy business marketeers can see that there is a huge boon to be had in creating an ‘on-demand’ captive audience.

As a business Facebook allows you to access a huge potential network of potential customers via the resources at hand in your office and at home or even at your local bar or kid’s school. The key to leveraging the Facebook platform for small business marketing is to focus on people. Before you can start doing anything cool on your new business’ fan page or before you invest any money in Facebook advertising you should focus on getting fans. If you’re just starting out in your venture then you need to hit up your friends and family to push their networks to become fans of your new page.

Once you have built up a solid base of fans, at least 100 to 200, it then gets much easier to get more fans and really start to grow an audience for your marketing materials. The key here is that growing your Facebook fan base provides you with a very quick route for marketing communications and perhaps more importantly the audience has opted in to be kept abreast of your message and in most cases checks the site at least once daily. Unlike a traditional business website (with a few exceptions) most users visit the site when they are going to purchase so any marketing materials at this point should only be reinforcing their purchase decision and perhaps up/cross selling your products.

Facebook on the other hand provides a super targeted, semi-latent marketing stream that has a very short channel to immersion. What does this mean? We it means that a very tight Facebook presence could in potentially yoink a user out of Facebook and deep in the prime retail space of their own site in two clicks, however realistically if you can get them out and shopping on your site in five you are doing very well.

So once the fan base is established we should then turn our attention to getting the user away from all the distractions of Facebook and it’s social networkery magic, somewhere they can focus on the job at hand, buying our stuff. There a re great Facebook fan pages out there, there are good pages too and then there are just fan pages. Let me tell you, just a fan page will do nothing for your business at all, in fact there is the potential for a poorly managed fan page to be hugely detrimental to your business image, if you don’t know what you’re doing or don’t have the time to manage it, either get someone who can or leave it alone altogether.

First up on the menu is getting the information filled out, be thorough use as much of the page as you can to get as much information relayed to the user in that initial page view as possible. This means managing the posts that ht your wall on a daily basis. If something is posted on the wall that doesn’t help the business delete it. Other wise for the first few weeks get something new on the page on a fairly frequent basis. When we are taking on a new client’s Facebook presence we generally post a new photo album daily for the first 2-3 weeks.

The point is to make sure that a visitor landing on your Facebook fan page sees enough going on to look to make them hang around and read a few post titles, check out a gallery or two or even hit the like button once or twice. Clearly you will know what information you want to share, the key is to not go overboard on day one. You will need some good content in the tank to make sure that your can last out the initial build out.

Once you are satisfied with the initial information and have populated at least a front page’s worth of updates, clean up by removing the annoying and meaningless items (i.e. notifications about changing or updating the information) and your page is ready. Now for the next two weeks you need to add a new photo album or post something on your own wall every day, these will end up notified on every fans’ page. Reinforcing your message for that critical two week period that builds loyalty and will pay big dividends in terms of repeat visitors in the long run.

I will revisit the strategy for good social marketing soon, but in the meantime follow this early phase strategy and you will have built your business a solid foundation from which to continue to build your social marketing presence.