Facebook Becoming More Important than Google?

I remember many, many years ago watching television with my husband and he asked what were the letters at the bottom of the screen of the television commercials. www.sony.com, www.att.com and so forth. It was the advent of the world wide web as a marketing mega giant. E-commerce was not even in the embryonic stages of the internet at this point, but many large companies saw the potential of electronic media as another advertising channel. Now I am seeing companies post their Facebook address instead of their website on commercials. I was amazed, but thrilled in the fact that I jumped on the Facebook bandwagon in the beginning!

Since the original www crazy days, many folks have used affiliate marketing, pay per click and sponsored searches to get traffic to their websites. Remember, the old adage in internet advertising is "Traffic is King". Google has long been the sponsored search and ppc giant and Yahoo! isn't far behing, now Bing is gaining some market share. But something amazing happened in March 13th of this year. Facebook overtook Google as the #1 most visited site in the US. For those of you that do not think this is big news - IT IS !!

Facebook is a advertising mecca. Social networking allows people who would otherwise not normally meet build relationships, gain some trust and perhaps do business. Many people do not understand that in order to do this well several key factors must be followed:

1 - Keep your business and personal life separate. If you have a business, you may want to create a "page" or "group" for that business and keep it separate from your personal profile. If your personal profile is going to contain family updates, etc, then you should not "friend" business acquaintances and just keep those relationships on the business "page" or "group".
2 - Keep your advertising to a reasonable volume and pepper it with useful facts, articles etc about your business or your industry. Constant advertising about a certain product or sale will make you look "spammy", infuriate your customers and may just drive them to your competitors.
3 - If you are going to be posting under your personal account, then pics should be appropriate, and beware of "friends" who will potentially post inappropriate material to your wall or comments. Again - another reason to keep it separate or be very careful to not cross this line.
4 - Games - do not send people who are acquaintances "game requests" unless you are 100% sure they are playing that game. It can be a nuisance and turn someone off to thinking that you are on FB all day playing Mafia Wars instead of running your business.

Facebook can be a valuable tool and is free (except for the amount of time you may spend on it), and if used wisely, can be potentially your best source for new revenue generation this year.

Have a tip on how to use FB more effectively?? Let me know and post a comment!!