A guest article this time. Sheffield based Jonathan Senior owns an online training company aimed at business and managers. He runs two blogs, the Sharp End Training blog and Learn on Demand. He has some expensive product creation software and is looking for internet marketers to partner with. Contact him through either blog.

A lot of business’s & marketers have switched onto facebook for marketing & promotion. After all,  alexa shows facebook to be the 3^rd ranked website in the world after google and yahoo and according to it’s own stats, there are 65 million regular users. That’s a big market place.

But most marketers miss a vital trick. In these days of mass automation and bulk processing, it’s easy to forget that behind each profile is a real person – not just a prospect.

Treating people’s profiles on facebook like printouts from any other automation or bulk processing tool is a good way to send your online reputation going the wrong way.

Why?

If you were selling something in the street, you wouldn’t systematically go through them asking them one at a time “Do you want to buy this?” and if they hesitated or said no – you moved onto the next one.

No you wouldn’t

That’s not very efficient or a good use of your time or resources.

The facebook danger (and admit it – we have all done it…) is going along to someone’s profile or a group and posting something like

“Hello I am [your name] and this is what I sell [link]” and then left.

You have never visited that page again. What you have done is just polluted the internet. It’s like graffiti spraying someone’s facebook profile.

There is a better way

It’s called actually getting to know people. You remember – you did it on your first day at school…

You find out what they like and don’t like (you do find out what your customers don’t like… don’t you?)

You ask them how they are; take an interest in what they do. (You might not be interested in swimming with sharks but they might be…)

And after a while, something magical happens – they begin to like you and even better, they may even trust you – so when they have a problem or they actually get bit by a shark they are likely to ask people they trust for advice. THEN it might be sale time.

Of course this is a longer lead time but something else magical happens – they tell their entire shark swimming mates who then seek advice from you. Now isn’t that better than selling one at a time ?

Thought you would agree?

So, my advice is – if you are building your online business using your own name, brand or image – then you CANNOT afford to be seen as an internet polluter. Whatever you are selling. You MUST be seen as someone people can trust.

Jonathan and his team have developed a video training course called “How to market your business on facebook”

Here is the link but subscribers to my rss feed will shortly receive a voucher worth 15% discount.