Facebook… Why?

Over the last few days, I’ve been trying to figure out how to better utilize Facebook as a blogger. To be more specific, I wanted to focus on what Facebook could offer me as far as:

Getting traffic to my blog
Interacting and building relationships with my target audience
Helping to establishing myself as an authority

These three things are all important aspects of becoming a successful blogger, as you probably already know.

I tried to look for posts from the big time bloggers specifically about Facebook and how one could utilize it for their blog, and if it was even worth it. What I did find had no definite answers, so I figured I’d just do it myself, see what happens, and report my findings back here for you.

The following is a compilation of my research, which I hope many of you can use as a primer if you’re at all interested in using Facebook for something useful from a personal branding perspective other than just re-connecting to your old high school friends, or showing off Farmville achievements. Which I will admit I do a lot of on my personal page.

Why Facebook?

Before I get into the actionable, how-to type stuff, it’s important to understand why Facebook should be paid attention to in the first place. Here are some astonishing statistics:

There are over 400 million active users (125 million from the USA alone!)
It has an Alexa ranking of 2, just behind Google.
On average, people spend 55 minutes a day on Facebook. (Average time spent on any given website: 10 seconds)

Personal Profiles vs. Groups vs. Pages

There are three basic ways to connect and engage with people on Facebook:

Your Personal Profile
A Group; or
A Page

Your personal profile is basically your primary account, where you can interact with friends and family. You may wish to just use your personal profile to advance your blog (which many people do), but knowing that you’re going to have to talk about whatever niche your blog is about from time to time, understand that this may end up annoying your friends and family who really just want to see pictures of you passed out in Vegas. For this reason, you may want to consider creating a Group or a Page for your blog, to keep things quasi-separate.

Mashable has a fantastic post about the differences between a Facebook Group and a Facebook Page, so I won’t repeat what they outline, but their bottom line is:

“Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.”

Because of this, I have started creating a Page for this blog. It works JUST like a personal profile, so it was easy for me to get used to, but it has many more features to help you integrate my blog and my brand (more on that in tomorrow’s post).