Following last week's tips on using Twitter for B2B marketing, I thought you might like a similar set of basic tactic for Facebook.
As with Twitter, the first thing to do is measure. Facebook allows administrators of a page to do this using its own internal analytics. Just visit a page that you administrate and click 'insights' on the middle right hand side. You should also measure how many 'likes' your page has and how quickly this number is growing. The best way to increase this is to 'friend' people relevant to your page, such as journalists, customers, prospects and other stakeholders, and then use the 'suggest to friends' button beneath your logo to ask them to 'like' your page.
Next, you should make sure your vanity URL is set up appropriately. Here's an article from this very Blog telling you how to do this. Next, you could consider adding a landing page to your Facebook page, as described by the lovely people at Mashable. You could also consider adding the LinkedIn profiles of your key C-Level staff to your Facebook page.
While you are considering the visual appearance of your page, take some time to consider what image you use in the logo box in the top left hand corner. A logo is fine, sure, but you are allowed a lot more space than that - so why not consider something more creative. Your image needs to be 180 pixels wide by 540 high; here's an example from the Stone Junction Facebook page. Don't forget to 'like' my page while you are there! It's a fair exchange for all this useful information, surely?
Last but not least, you should interact with people on Facebook for business purposes. I would recommend using either a corporate Facebook profile (not a page; a profile) or an individual profile which is separate from your regular, personal, Facebook profile for these purposes. Only you can decide the level of interaction that works for your business, but somewhere between the tone of voice you use for personal purposes and the one you would use on your web site is about right. Here's a good example from PCB broker ALR Services.
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