6

Facebook: Developing a Community of Friends

You’re probably already on Facebook, but you may not be getting the most out of it. You could use this incredibly powerful tool for personal branding. The main purpose of using Facebook is to create a community and connect people. Connecting with people and creating community can help fuel the influence behind your brand. Influence creates viral marketing within a community. More on that later.

When it comes to Facebook users, 82 percent of all 18–29-year-olds are on it, but so are 79 percent of 30–49-year-olds (their parents). And 56 percent of people over 65 are on it.³

People still assume that only young people are using Facebook, but that bubble got popped years ago. Now nearly everyone is using it, regardless of age. They’re sharing content, thoughts, ideas, and opinions. And each one of them builds some type of identity, whether personal or professional, with Facebook.

Why Should You Use Facebook?

Facebook exists to help people connect and stay in touch. Where LinkedIn is an extremely professional site, Facebook is truly the personal tool for your personal brand. Many people use Facebook as a way to share pictures, opinions, and content about their personal lives—cat videos, pictures of their kids, and their thoughts on the 2016 presidential campaign. (If you missed it, count yourself lucky. We both nearly quit Facebook by October 2016.)

Others add a page to their account and a community site around their organization, brand, or personality. Some still use it as a community site to gather different groups of people into an online group or fan page. (More on professional pages later.)

What we have found over the years is that the essence of your personal life has an impact on your professional brand. Plenty of professionals sell their products and services in direct association with their personal lives. What you do, see, and involve yourself in daily relates to your job.

And in a growing freelance and small-business economy, it’s not uncommon to be friendly with your clients, blurring the line between personal and professional. That can be good or bad.

An example: An insurance agent creates a Facebook group page for her son’s Little League team and uses it to help promote her business. We’re not talking about being awkward like, “Your kid might break an arm with that bat! Are you insured?” We’re talking about using the team as the middle ground to connect with the other parents.

When you create a common association with other people, they’re more likely to join the group. Eventually you can enter into deeper conversations with other parents because of the relationship built from the team—and let it be known that you’re an insurance agent, for example.

However, people who are Facebook friends with their colleagues, clients, and networking groups often forget the #1 rule of personal branding: Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your boss, client, and mother to see on a billboard.

Another example: So, a web designer gets into a heated online shouting match with someone from the other side of a political argument, complete with insults. The web designer’s client sees it and doesn’t actually care about the argument either way. But she’s so shocked at her web designer’s behavior that she cancels her business relationship with him.

Is that fair? No. Are we saying you should hide who you are on Facebook? Absolutely not. We’re just saying don’t be mean to people in general. And maybe don’t friend your damn clients for just this reason!

Facebook is the website to make that connection happen. Are the parents of the other children on the team prospective clients? Probably. Could the insurance broker create a connection with other parents because of her kid’s baseball team? Definitely.

Click here to view code image

@edeckers:  Do you think @YourDamnEditor would let us use
            our kids to market the book?
@kyleplacy: I don't see why not. We've been acting like children
            the whole time.
@Your
DamnEditor: Amen!

We do not condone the use of your children to sell your products. (Well, maybe a little, if they’re adorable.) We do condone finding similar interests and circumstances to create connections with people. And Facebook, if you can balance it properly, will let you create a greater connection between your personal and professional lives. It can strengthen personal relationships in a way that can turn into professional relationships and vice versa.

With nearly two billion people using Facebook, you’re more than likely going to know someone on the site already—unless you’re a hermit, which raises more questions than we have time for. If you already use Facebook, you’re aware of the staggering amount of time most people spend on it every day. If you haven’t yet joined, trust us: People really, really like to use Facebook. Consider some of these statistics:

• More than half of all users—1.57 billion—log on to Facebook daily with a mobile device; 1.18 billion are desktop users.

• The average Facebook user has 155 friends.

• On average, more than 300 million photos are uploaded per day.⁴ (Half of these are of people’s feet at the beach.)

Used correctly, Facebook can be a great tool for building your personal brand. You need to learn how to share information safely and tastefully, and you need to know what the site can do for your personal brand.

What Can Facebook Do for You?

You may be among the millions of people already logging into Facebook every day or every hour, using it to catch up with old friends, reconnect with former classmates, and share your latest baby pictures with your family. Just as you use Facebook as a social support system, you can use it to build professional networks and enhance your personal brand. Facebook has a variety of built-in tools to do all these things.

Reconnect with Old Classmates and Coworkers

It might be hard to imagine reconnecting with your long-lost friends from high school or college, but they could still be great connections 10 or 20 years later.

Facebook lets you reconnect with just about anyone. It’s just as important to reconnect with people you’ve lost touch with—from high school, college, and previous jobs—as it is to expand your network with new people. The more people you connect with, the more opportunity you can have in the future to grow your network and brand.

How can our hero, Allen, use Facebook to reconnect? Allen (influencer) could reconnect with old classmates and past co-workers to build his network in the advertising field. He graduated with a double major in design and marketing. His classmates from college are probably involved in other advertising agencies or ad firms. He can connect, network, and build a relationship to further his search for the job.

Professionally Brand Yourself

There are two types of pages in Facebook: personal and professional. You don’t need to use your personal profile for your personal brand strategy, especially if you want to keep your personal life completely separate from your professional. Instead, use a page for your professional identity and a personal profile for your private life.

How could our hero, Darrin, use this feature? Darrin (free agent) needs to start building a personal brand to build his identity among the IT and corporate professionals in his local area. He must create a page to further his professional brand, gain influence in his industry, and fetch bigger clients.

Be Philanthropic

What could be a better way to build your personal brand than to support a cause? Facebook Causes is an application that makes it easy for you to support different causes and to persuade your friends to give to each cause. Every brand, including the personal ones, should have a philanthropic side to it. When you support different causes, you build your personal brand story.

If you were to ask entrepreneur or business professionals how they became successful, the majority would say “philanthropy.” When you give your money and time to an organization, you have the opportunity to network with other individuals associated with the organization.

How might our hero, Beth, use this feature? This is a perfect example of something Beth (our climber) would use to further her network in the corporate ranks at the insurance company. By supporting causes (through Facebook) that the company supports, she can show her commitment to the company and share that commitment with the rest of her Facebook network. In some cases, she may even be asked to join a local board of directors, which will help her meet other influencers in her community.

Find Local Events

Networking is extremely important to building your personal brand (see “Chapter 12, How to Network: Hello, My Name Is…”) Facebook Events helps you find events in your area to attend to meet new people. The more people you meet, the more opportunity you have to expand your territory and spread your personal brand story.

How can Carla use this feature? This function is for the networker among the heroes. Carla (neophyte) is completely starting over from being a pharmaceutical rep to looking for a job in the world of nonprofits. She needs to network with people in her new field and attend events to meet those individuals. She can use Facebook to track events, add them to her calendar, and find out who else will be attending each event. (She should also spend a lot of time on the Causes pages.)

There are plenty of ways to use Facebook for personal branding. The first step is to create your own personal profile.

What You Should Know About Facebook

Like all social networking sites, Facebook has different elements and uses specific terms to describe its features and functions: the pages and personal profiles (see Table 6.1). Remember from the Twitter and LinkedIn chapters that when you connect with individuals on the sites, they are described in different terms; a Twitter friend is called a “follower,” and a LinkedIn friend is called a “connection.”

On Facebook when someone connects with you on your personal profile, he becomes a friend. When an individual connects with you on your page, she becomes a fan. You want friends and fans!

Table 6.1 List of Important Facebook Vocabulary

Personal profile	Your personal page on Facebook
Applications	Fun and interactive elements that can be added to your pages
Discussion board	Area on the page where fans can engage in topic-based dialogue
Wall/News feed	Your personal page that logs all activity on Facebook by your friends and your profile
Poke	An awkward way to say hello
Status update	A way to let your friends in on your activities and feelings
Tag	A way to let your friends know they are in a picture posted to your page
PM/Private Message	A message sent between two friends on Facebook

The professional page is Facebook’s way to give businesses Facebook accounts. Facebook calls these professional pages, well, “professional pages,” but for clarity, we refer to them only as “pages.”

To truly take advantage of Facebook as a personal branding tool, you need to build a personal profile and a page to house, store, and create the communication funnel that can nurture your Facebook network.

Professional Page vs. Personal Profile

There are two types of pages you can create on Facebook: the personal profile and the professional page (see Table 6.2). Facebook personal profiles are meant to represent a single individual and not an overall entity, so personal profiles and professional pages have unique content and offer different Facebook functionality.

What type of page should you create? A Facebook personal profile or a professional page?

To start, just use the personal profile. But as you gain some notoriety as a speaker, writer, business leader, entertainer, actor, musician, or anyone in the public eye, then you’ll want a professional page.

All pages must have a personal profile connected to them. Profiles are the keys to every page you develop. You can have multiple pages associated with one personal profile, but you can’t have a page without a profile.

You can use your individual profile for business or for your personal life, but it’s usually best to keep them separate; after all, you might not want potential clients seeing pictures of you three drinks into your best friend’s wedding. We’ve all been there.

The point is, there is information that you want to share with your family and friends that you don’t necessarily want to share with business associates. If you want to keep a Facebook profile completely private, lock it down in the privacy settings and keep it separate from your page.’

Table 6.2 Differences Between Facebook Pages and Personal Profile

	Personal Profile	Page
Who is allowed to use the page?	Individuals.	Businesses and individuals.
Can you invite friends to the page?	You can mass invite people to your personal profile by email.	No. However, you can invite people to join your page from your personal profile page.
Can you update your status?	Yes.	Yes.
Can you mass message your friends?	Yes.	No. You can only send a page update to your supporters.
Are applications allowed?	Yes.	Yes.
Is there a limit to the number of friends you can connect with?	5,000.	No. You can have an unlimited number of fans.
Can you run analytics applications on the page?	No.	Yes. Pages have analytics to measure the effectiveness of your content.

After you set up your personal profile, you can next set up a page to reflect your business (and personal brand). A professional page is particularly useful if you hope to gain thousands of followers because, unlike personal profiles, pages have no caps on the number of friends who can connect to the page.

Kyle experienced Facebook’s limit when his personal profile hit the 5,000-friend mark and he wasn’t allowed to add more friends. He then created a page to manage the friend overflow from his personal account and turned them into supporters of his professional page.

Needless to say, having to create a page after spending so much time on his personal profile was a pain. If you plan to grow past 5,000 friends, create a page right after creating your personal profile. (Or just don’t be so greedy.)

The Basics: Creating a Personal Profile

When you first visit Facebook.com, you’re asked to register with the massive Facebook database. The straightforward form asks for your name, birth date, and email address. Next, fill out your personal profile by uploading a picture of yourself; share personal information, including where you’ve worked and gone to school; and search for people you know in the database (see Figure 6.1).

Like Twitter and LinkedIn, Facebook makes it easy to find your friends in the database. If you use a public email program, such as Google Mail or Yahoo! Mail, to register your Facebook account, Facebook searches for your contacts in your contact list. When you find people you know, send them an invitation to become a Facebook friend and link their profile to yours.

Facebook also asks for current and former employers, bio, hometown, likes, and interests. The likes and interests portion of your profile is a great opportunity to build your personal brand. It’s up to you to decide how much information you want to share on Facebook, but this will help you connect with new people. (Later, we’ll talk about security and different profile filters you can create to block people from receiving certain pieces of data.) We recommend filling out the information you are comfortable sharing.

Figure 6.1 After you create your account, you are asked to enter additional information into your personal profile.

One of the most important part of this process is choosing your profile picture. We have talked about this at length in other chapters, but we’ll look at it again. Keep your professional persona throughout every social network. Your picture should be current and focus only on you. To upload a great Facebook profile picture, follow these tips:

• Use quality profile pictures for all networks. This is extremely important for your personal brand and your Facebook profile (or professional page). What is a quality photo? It’s a picture of your wonderful face. It should also be professional and fit your personality.

• A picture from spring break is probably not your best portrayal, and a group photo of you and your friends is not helpful. Use the same professional, high-quality photo on each of your social network sites, from LinkedIn to Twitter to Facebook. If you would like to show a more personal side to your profile, use different photos for your personal and professional pages.

• Make sure your photo was taken with a decent camera, and crop it in tightly so your face is nicely framed.

• Be approachable. You don’t have to smile, but don’t look sad and downcast either. We’re drawn to happy-looking professional people.

Finally, some people change their profile picture every few months, while other people (Erik) will keep theirs for a few years. Regardless of what you do, people must be able to recognize you from your profile picture.

Stay in Control of Your Profile

After you set up your personal profile, you have to decide who can access your profile as well as how it appears to the public. Facebook provides tools that give you specific control. The first issue is the privacy settings and controls of your Facebook profile, and the second issue is your customized URL. You can use both tools to your advantage.

Your Personal Page Privacy Settings

Let’s be honest: Facebook is not completely private. You can keep your friends and family from reading your content, but Facebook still has access to everything you post on their network⁵, including your private messages⁶ to other people.

This is not meant to scare you away from using Facebook. We only want to make you aware of why you should use the privacy settings.

You may be thinking, “I’m a brand, so I’m not concerned about my personal privacy. I want to show my brand to all who will look, listen, and be enraptured by my personal branding prowess.”

Are you done now? Keep in mind, you’re not invincible. You need to understand the potential security problems you could face.

It’s hard for Facebook to keep up-to-date with all the hacking and scams happening inside the network. Hackers phish for your information so they can break into your account and steal your information to sell to others.

“Phishing for information” means exactly what it sounds like. Hackers create a code that pulls information from a large number of people. This could include family member names, home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and other pertinent information. Everything can be public if you’re not careful.

You can prevent hackers from getting your data. The first way is self-explanatory: Do not share information you would prefer others not have. Second, use Facebook’s privacy settings to block your information from the bad guys as well as people you didn’t like in high school, and keep your personal information as secret as possible.

Setting Up Your Privacy Settings for Your Personal Account

Phishing scams and hackers aren’t the only security threats users face on Facebook. You need to keep your personal brand safe, and that starts with determining how you’ll set up the privacy settings for your profile. Remember, all content in your profile is public and open to the Internet community until you lock it down.

When you log in to Facebook, your main screen shows your stream and other tools to interact with the world of Facebook (refer to Table 6.1). Before you begin exploring, you need to secure your account to your comfort. Go to the far top right of the window and click the little arrow. When the drop-down menu appears, select the “Settings” button. Next, click “Privacy Settings” on the left side of the window. Check out Figure 6.2 for a screen shot of the options.

On the Privacy Settings page, you have several options for choosing who can see your content and what they can see. Below that are “Timelines” and “Tagging Settings” (where you manage whether you can be tagged in other people’s photos), and the “Blocking Setting” (where you block stalkers and rude people).

Figure 6.2 The privacy settings box gives you additional options for personal profile security.

You have three basic settings to choose from: “Everyone,” which makes your profile completely public; “Friends of Friends”, which requires placing a certain amount of trust in the people your friends know; and “Friends Only,” which means that only your Facebook friends can see your content. You can further customize your settings for who can see future and past posts, and your friends list. Click the “Edit Settings” button next to each to set your privacy.

Part of security is also protecting your name. When you create a website, choose a URL that exemplifies your brand. When you get an email address, use your name, or a variation of it.

The same applies to Facebook URLs and usernames. So, don’t pick a name like HotDudez89 as your Facebook name, because that will also be your Facebook URL. (Similarly, don’t pick that for your email name, because that’s what you’ll be using when you communicate with potential employers.)

Working with Your Customized URL

When you join Facebook and create your personal profile, you are given an automated URL, such as “http://www.facebook.com/id=20392023/”. This ID is your “name” on Facebook.

Needless to say, this URL is overly long and hard to remember. Your personal name is extremely important to your personal brand. Facebook lets you change that username into a customized URL; you can use your name in your link instead of an ID number. Kyle’s company has a Facebook URL that’s similar to the company’s website: “https://www.facebook.com/lessonlyapp,” instead of something long and complicated.

To set up your Facebook customized URL, go to the General section of your settings. Check out Figure 6.3. The General button is on the top of the left sidebar.

You’ll see a place for you to set your customized URL for your personal profile. You need to set your name so another user cannot steal it.

Your new customized URL is the personal destination to your brand. Users can enter your Facebook username as a search term on Facebook, which makes it much easier for people to find and connect with you.

Figure 6.3 You can customize your Facebook URL. We strongly recommend you use your own name, or some variation of it.

Now that your personal profile is set, you can build a Facebook page that allows you to share your content with your network of friends. You can build relationships, find places to visit, causes to support, and events to attend.

Using a Professional Page for Personal Branding

Facebook pages are extremely important when creating your personal brand and telling your story. Why? They can reach millions of people in the blink of an eye! The main purpose for using Facebook is to create a community element around your brand. When you have a community, you can experience the beauty of viral communication. Use a page to promote your personal brand for these four great reasons:

• Facebook reaches billions of people: With nearly 2 billion users, some of them are bound to like your brand, and a professional page makes your brand accessible to them. Unlike your personal profile, your professional page has no limits to the number of Facebook supporters that can like it.

• Facebook pages allow for community-based relationships to develop: Having your brand on a page is an outlet to post all things about you, but not all things deeply personal to you. A page separates the personal from the professional. It allows you to maintain your professional presence on Facebook.

• You can share business updates and post videos and pictures for the people who joined your page and want to know the latest news. A page allows professional relationships to develop because people are on the page for professional purposes. A page also lets you grow your professional community in step with your personal community. It gives your audience an outlet to reach you without cluttering up your Inbox.

• Advertise through Facebook ads: A professional page gives you plenty of opportunities for paid advertising, whether you just want to promote your brand or sell something. You can create ads that appear on Facebook sidebars. You are in complete control of who you want your audience to be. Target your desired product/service demographic, and verify results with your analytics.

When you set your desired demographics, Facebook tells you how many potential users are available to click your ad. Say you want to run an ad for the Humane Society and reach single females between the ages of 40–55 who live within a 10-mile radius of your zip code. Facebook can tell you that 5,403 women meet the criteria and use Facebook. You can test ads you create to see what works best. The ads can promote your page or your website. By using the “Like” button, you can see how influential your ad is to the Facebook demographic.

Facebook ads (see Figure 6.4) are based on a pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-impression (also called CPM, which means “cost per thousand impressions.” M is the Roman numeral for 1,000) model of payment. PPC is when a user clicks on your ad, and you pay a price you previously set. CPM happens every time your ad is shown, whether it’s clicked or not. Once you reach a set budget amount, your ad stops showing for the day.

The price for PPC varies so much. Facebook fluctuates their best cost based on the amount of use in a given 12-hour period. To stay relevant, look at the amount Facebook asks you to spend. You set the budget and can change it at any time.

Organic content (status updates) usually get a better click-through rate than paid ads. Although Facebook ads are amazing for driving users to your pages, don’t lose sight of organic (unpaid) content. You need to measure the influence of both types.

• Facebook analytics provide insight: Only a professional page lets you use Facebook Insights, an analytics package, equivalent to Google Analytics (see Figure 6.5, which is not our data). With Insights, you can gather data about your readers, including which posts get the most reactions, when users visit your page most often, and the demographics of your page’s fans. This helps you understand and expand your base. Without this, you would have to do extensive research to find the same information.

Figure 6.4 Target your message to your company’s key demographic to make your Facebook ad campaign successful.

Figure 6.5 Facebook Insights provides you with qualified information that helps you make content and fan growth decisions.

Using Insights to Track Your Content Growth

Facebook Insights allow you to gauge who your connections are in terms of gender, age, location, and language. Instead of wasting time on extensive research, these charts show who and where your target audience is. The system is extremely valuable for anyone using professional pages to build a company brand on Facebook.

The Insights data is easy to understand and use to see the growth of your page and demographic information. Play around with the data a little bit to understand the different aspects of the tool. The Insights application gives you four extremely valuable tools for building your personal brand on Facebook:

• Measure interactions and engagement: Insights allows you to measure how your fans interacted with the content you shared on the page. When you post a story to your wall and a fan likes and comments on it, that’s an interaction. The more interaction your content gets, the more likely your fans will come back for more.

• Capitalize on content: Use the interactions numbers to determine what content users find most interesting. Give your audience what they want. When you see increased interactions, it means your content has been watched and read by your fans. You need to share more of that type of content. You also can now see analytics for referral traffic and stream stories in the dashboard to get an idea of what people are sharing and not sharing.

• Save and export data: Insights allows you to export data into a spreadsheet. This gives you an enhanced view of the data you see on the Insights dashboard. This also lets you save the exported files and research different trends over months at a time.

• Conduct advanced research: Insights also lets you see some basic metrics relative to the activity on your professional page. You can greatly expand on the analytics capabilities when you integrate them with more robust tracking systems that link directly to Facebook to answer some of your more direct business questions. The number of likes and the gender of those who visit your business page mean nothing if you cannot do anything with that information. But unless you’re working with thousands of visitors and selling a lot of products online, don’t worry about this just yet.

Setting Up Your Professional Page

When you’re ready to set up your professional page, you’ll find that it’s not much more difficult than setting up your personal profile. The important thing is to visualize how you want to portray your professional persona, and then build your page with that vision in mind.

First, select “Create Page” in the far right menu at the top of the blue Facebook bar where you can start the process. Once you start, you’ll be shown a list of options: “Local Business;” “Company or Institution;” “Brand or Product;” “Artist, Band, or Public Figure;” “Entertainment;” and “Cause or Community.” Choose an option, then add some content.

The Facebook page (as shown in Figure 6.6) is already constructed, and you can see the places to upload your photo (or logo), your cover photo, and other important pieces of information and content. The page has much of the same content as a personal profile except it caters to the public-facing aspect of your personal brand.

Figure 6.6 Just like the personal profile, a page gives you additional fields to fill in pertinent information for your business or brand.

Top Four Tips for Using Facebook

Keep these tips in mind every time you log on to your Facebook account:

1. Realize your brand is public on Facebook: If you’re not using the security settings discussed earlier in this chapter, your profile page is completely public. More than likely, a Google search of your name can even bring up your Facebook profile. Is your mom looking at your profile? How about your boss or ex-spouse? Remember, share content that is reasonable and won’t cause you trouble.

2. Write on your friends’ walls: Remember the wall from Table 6.1? The Facebook wall is a personal feed that records everything your friends do on Facebook. Writing on your friend’s Facebook profile wall is a great way to build relationships. Don’t just post messages on your wall—go to theirs and send them a special note, like a birthday wish or a congratulations for a special accomplishment.

3. Create events on Facebook and invite your friends: Facebook lets you invite your friends to the events that you host or are just attending. This can help you get more people to your events.

Just don’t invite all your out-of-town friends, because they won’t be able to attend anyway. It can be rather spammy if you invite all of your friends to an event, so limit the invitations to people who live less than an hour away.

4. Join a Facebook group: Remember the insurance agent who created a Facebook group for her kid’s baseball team? Consider joining a Facebook group or two to help promote your personal brand.

You can create or join groups on Facebook depending on your subject matter or personal brand story. After you join a group, you can send private messages to other members or comment on their profiles. You could start a group associated with your high school graduating class, fans of a sports team, employees of a company, members of your church, and other extracurricular activities. Erik belongs to several writing groups, while Kyle belongs to a local Chamber of Commerce group and one on the future of space travel.

Ten Do’s and Don’ts of Facebook

First things first. Tear out this portion of the book and post it above your computer or on your mobile device.

Click here to view code image

@edeckers:  Don't have them tear out pages from the book! That's
            destroying books. That's just wrong.
@kyleplacy: But then they have to buy more books.
@edeckers:  Tear, readers! Tear like the wind!
@kyleplacy: Or I suppose they could photocopy them.

1. Do upload a real picture: Upload a picture that is real and has some type of substance to it (that is, not a photo of you as a baby, your baby, your dog, or a photo with you and friends). Both your personal and professional pages should have the same photo for consistency’s sake.

After you have established your personal brand and accomplished some goals, you can switch pictures on your personal and professional pages, but for now, stick with your head shot.

See Figure 6.7 for an example of Kyle’s personal page and Figure 6.8 for his professional page photo.

Figure 6.7 This is Kyle’s professional page and professional photo he uses to develop his professional and personal brand.

Figure 6.8 Kyle shows the more laid-back and human side to his brand on his personal page.

2. Do share industry-specific content: Post content that highlights your personal interests and your professional areas of expertise on your personal and professional pages (not your personal profile). If you’re interested in marketing, you might post a link to an interesting article.

3. Do use your email to find friends: Earlier, we talked about importing your email contact list to find friends on Facebook. If you have not already completed this step, we want you to put down this book and complete it now. Seriously, do it. Importing your contact list is one of the more important things you can do on your personal profile. It helps you connect with users that you already know in the real world.

4. Don’t “Build on Rented Land”: Several years ago, businesses put hundreds and thousands of dollars into Facebook Markup Language (FBML) pages, only to have Facebook drop FBML and introduce frames. Later, after they had persuaded businesses to put a lot of effort and energy into new business pages, they throttled their reach to only one percent of their total followers, unless they paid a promotional cost.

The lesson? Never put your best work or all your content onto something that you don’t own. This is why we told you to set up your own blog and website in Chapter 3. You control the content, you control the reach, and you’re in charge of it all. You don’t want to build the home of your dreams on someone else’s property, so don’t rely on Facebook (or any other social network) to keep your content safe and in your total control.

5. Don’t use inappropriate language: “Duh, I would never use bad language on Facebook. That stuff is permanent.” Some people do. (We know you wouldn’t. We were talking to your friend who’s thumbing through this book.) Keep things clean, and keep the content great. Don’t drop the f-bomb on your Facebook wall because you’re mad at your cable company or got into a political disagreement. You’ll be a better person for it.

6. Don’t spam people: Spamming is when you share content that has nothing to do with your goals or objectives. It’s when you constantly post promotional or commercial content instead of focusing on your relationships. Why would anyone want to become your friend when all you do is post about the stuff you sell? People want to know what you’re trying to accomplish in the world. If we go to your personal profile and all you have is content and no interaction, you’re more than likely spamming your followers, or at least annoying them.

This also applies to game invites. If you invite someone to a game and they don’t join, don’t ask them again. No means no. (Also, if people keep doing it to you, you can block all invites from that particular company.)

7. Don’t tag everyone in a picture: Don’t tag anyone in a picture that they’re not in. And be aware, some people don’t like to be tagged at all. They should lock all that down in their security settings, but don’t take it personally if they demand to be untagged. They’re thinking about their own safety and security, so respect that.

8. Don’t sync your Twitter profile with your Facebook page: Facebook updates are completely different from Twitter updates. Twitter users can read hundreds of different updates, and write a few dozen, in one sitting. You don’t want to flood a user’s timeline with your Twitter chatter. If anyone ever suggests this, just ignore them and re-examine your entire relationship with them.

9. Don’t invite people to your professional page over and over: After you set up your professional page on Facebook, you will be asked to invite friends to “like” your page. Some will accept, and some will do nothing. Don’t take it personally. It’s okay to invite users a couple of times in case they accidentally missed it, but don’t request the same friends over and over again. No means no. People get annoyed when they’re asked to do something repeatedly. Request more than three times, and you become an awkward stalker. And no one likes a stalker.

Facebook Tips in 140 Characters or Less

We asked our Twitter friends to give us some tips on how to use Facebook for personal branding, marketing, and self-promotion. As always, our friends came through for us. They gave us a ton of excellent advice!

• Always make sure your profile pic is of you. —@talk2RyanMitch

• Funny, sports, and food mixed in make you human. Don’t be a robot! —@mbj

• Converse. Create and convert. Converse with people. Create content and then convert people to fans. —@MrDrewLarison

• Share timely information in your market. —@tojosan

• Take a look at the “People You May Know.” You may find connections you haven’t thought of. —@TimChaize

• Remember to look at your Insights in order to track progress of content. —@aims999

• Read the Facebook TOS [terms of service]. It will benefit you in the long run. —@MrsRachelLacy

• Be sure your profile pic is clear and well-lit. —@fleurdeleigh

• List interests that best differentiate you, but don’t overdo it. —@edeckers

• Don’t underestimate the importance of your “Favorite Music” section. —@kyleplacy

• Pay attention to the lists on Facebook. Sort your friends, colleagues, and family. —@igc

1. https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

2. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html

3. http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/demographics-of-key-social-networking-platforms-2/

4. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

5. https://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation

6. https://qz.com/940488/youre-about-to-help-facebook-understand-how-your-private-messages-make-you-feel/