Earlier this week, Digital Insights ran an introduction to Facebook Marketing for about 35 Businesses in conjunction with Dublin City Enterprise Board. Always very interesting to run these workshops you get such a mix of businesses from solicitors, architects, doctors, jewellery makers, health professionals, restaurant and bar owners for example, all looking to try and figure out how to use Facebook from a business perspective (along with all the other relevant social media tools). All these small businesses, have one thing in common, that they needed to use social media to develop meaningful warmed up leads with very little dispensable budget. Great session, lots of questions looking for tangible answers. The best way for small businesses to start leveraging social media is to seriously think about who and why it is they are targetting certain prospects (as well as existing customers) and what are they going to communicate and offer these prospects through these channels. Is there any value in what they are communicating – does anyone care? There are by all accounts 37 Million Facebook Business Pages as of them filing IPO – there’s going to be a lot more as more and more businesses are jumping in. Lots of noise. And its very easy to filter that noise out on Facebook. Some businesses will do a good job marketing and communicating on Facebook – most won’t – because they dont understand the medium, how people engage on these channels, and nor do they do the basics in thinking about what it is they are trying to communicate and making sure that someone cares – but thats the opportunity for those of us who make the effort and try very hard to understand why we are using these channels and who we’re looking to communicate with.

Have a read through the presentation – its meant as an overview and introduction – during the session we went through how easy it is to set up a page and landing page using a third party app and generally a walk through of the application. Whats easy is setting up a a page, whats hard is sustaining it with good and relevant content.