Navigating the Maze of Facebook

Facebook can be an exceptionally good social media platform for connecting with people to promote your brand, book, cause or business.  But first you need to be sure you’re not stepping on any Facebook landmines.

What’s a Facebook landmine?

The truth is that this can change at any moment.  But there is some definite information:

The personal profile page you set up must be in your own name and not in the name of your brand, book cause or business.  If you don’t use your own name and Facebook discovers this, your profile can be yanked from Facebook without warning.

And while I believe you can use a logo photo or book cover as your profile photo without being in violation of Facebook’s terms (as long as the profile is in your name), I would recommend you use your own photo because people like to see the people they “friend.”

Facebook has recently become stricter with sending large number of friend requests at one time (or in one short period of time).  Someone mentioned on a webinar that he was suspended from Facebook and I suspect this is why.  And although the exact number of how many is too many isn’t known, I recommend you only send a few friend requests at one time.

Plus it is probably a good idea to include a personal (but NOT the same) message to each person.  This indicates that you are taking time to be selective about friend requests and not just clicking on sending friend requests to everyone you come across.

A couple of years ago a well-known Internet marketer got her Facebook profile dropped because, apparently, the photos of her nude baby were in violation of Facebook’s terms.  A coordinated campaign to get her back on Facebook was successful.  But it took a lot of well-placed friends to accomplish this.

Facebook’s terms are quite lengthy, and there are undoubtedly additional landmines for the unwary.  Of course, if you spam lots of profiles or use swear words or post inappropriate photos or anything else that the Facebook algorithms are set to spot, you can expect to get kicked off if you are discovered.

Cautionary tip: Because you can unknowingly step on a Facebook landmine, it is very important to have a second admin on any group pages or Facebook Pages (formerly fan pages) that you create.  This way, if you are kicked off wrongly, while you fight to get reinstated someone else can manage your pages.

Once you’ve gotten through the personal profile setup, you can set up a Facebook Page for your brand, book, cause or business for people to “like.”  Here there are two major sand traps:
You cannot change the title of the page or the category once you have created the Facebook Page.  So choose both of these carefully.  And remember that the title of a Facebook Page is searchable outside Facebook, so do use keywords where appropriate.

Although Facebook Pages are set for the wall of the Page to be the default when someone comes to your Page, you can create a customized landing tab (think page) and make that the default.  You can include on this customized landing tab, for example, an email optin box using the same code that is used on your website for this purpose.

Of course, traffic goes both ways because you can put a Facebook widget on your website that allows people to “like” your Facebook Page while still on your website.  (Note that this “like” of a Facebook Page is different from the Facebook “like” button that appears on blog posts and blog pages throughout the Internet.)

A final caution:  If you are very active on Twitter, do NOT automatically send every tweet through to your Facebook account and your LinkedIn account.  People on these two sites do not want to see as many updates as are appropriate for Twitter.  Use a selective tweets application to send only certain tweets through to your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.