Add your Business to Facebook (for Free)!

From a business standpoint, Facebook’s killer feature is it’s Social Network, which gives even none-techies the ability to share nuggets of information found both on Facebook and the web at large with their friends.

What I didn’t realise until recently is that Facebook also allows businesses to set up pages inside the walled garden, that gives FB’s users the opportunity to show their support of your business by becoming ‘Fans’.

It doesn’t cost anything to set up a business page, which comes with a reporting tool that shows you just how many visits / page views / fans you’re getting per day, an update tool that allows you to send news items to your fans, and a bunch of advertising tools that you can use to promote your business page.

I set Bouldr up on the 21st November 2007 (check it out!), and already I have around 15 fans, with a slew of visitors coming from Facebook over to Bouldr’s main site. If you have a website that could benefit from a little social promotion, I’d suggest taking a look at Facebook’s business listing service - it’s free, so there is very little risk, really.

Your Friends are Pokemon

I first noticed that I was a slave to Facebook when I was talking to a friend of a friend. We talked casually for a while, in the normal ‘getting to know you’ way, eventually touching on whether each other has a Facebook account. This seemed perfectly natural, however, on reflection, I could see that I had actually been working towards this question for the entire conversation; I wanted to breech The Facebook Threshold, and add this person as a friend.

This was not the first time I had considered the possibility that I have been trawling my friends friend lists just to increase the friend count on my own profile, rather the first time I have accepted this seemingly innocuous yet worrying prospect.

Speaking to my own friends, I find that this trend continues: many of those with more than fifty friends have actually collected people that they don’t consider to be friends with any more - people from their pre-school days that are now 25 years old or more, and that they haven’t spoken to or seen in the intervening period.

Maybe it’s just our social vanity getting the best of us, but escaping from this arms race feels almost impossible from the inside.