Six Things Businesses Need to Know About Facebook's TimelineFacebook offers a multitude of tools that will help your business excel such as Social Ads, Pages, Beacon, Insights, Platform, and Polls. These tools are there to help you in building your brand on your Facebook Page while attracting visitors and future clients.

It’s wise to start by learning all about these tools. This will save you a lot of time in the long run. In the following section you’ll learn how this all ties together which will show you how essential these tools are in running a successful Facebook business. You can learn all about these tools by going to the business section at Facebook.com.

Social Ads

What makes social ads so powerful and unique, is their direct interaction with the news feeds of your friends and fans. This gives you an advantage because anyone who has added you as a friend will see information about your business directly on their profile.

This is also an advantage because you can directly control who sees your ads, which helps you to target your traffic without much effort. As with any kind of marketing, targeting your traffic has proven time after time to raise your conversions.

Facebook Pages

If you have a business, you definitely should create a Facebook page. Make sure that you create a page and not a profile. They are not the same thing. The Facebook page you create will be your businesses’ profile page. Additionally it helps your brand image. You know when someone on Facebook interacts with your site, that you’ve gained a potential customer.

People treat your page the same as they would any of their friends. They search and read things that they’re interested in. What’s great about Facebook is that anyone can post on your wall and share their opinion. Your Facebook page is a playground for your creative genius to come to life and shine. The more apps, quizzes, surveys, contests, or starting of groups you do, the more people will want to interact on your page. You should base your activities around your niche and the image you are trying to build for your company.

Facebook Beacon

There is another service called the Facebook Beacon that will help you promote your business to your friends and fans. Beacon allows Facebook to post your business news directly on your friends feeds so the interaction is steady and consistent.

You can also choose if you want your friends to get a message every time someone purchases one of your products. When people see that someone else purchased something, more times than not they will check out the product that someone else ordered. If you are on Facebook, you know how your page tells you every time one of your friends makes an update or posts pictures on their wall. Well this is kind of the same thing. It’s not intrusive and you don’t feel offended by it, you just know that this is the way Facebook works, therefore it is an excellent tactic to receive more sales. For this to work you will need to paste some code to your website.

Your company, service, or product will increase by word of mouth because when people share your page it encourages others to interact on your site.. If you are nervous that this will affect the user’s privacy or your business privacy don’t be because people always have the choice to deny updates. There are other options to protect your privacy as well as their’s.

Facebook Insights

Just like when you are marketing online and want to check the statistics about people interacting on your site and clicking your ads; Facebook Insights can do this for you when you are marketing on Facebook. Facebook Insights is the perfect tool to measure which campaigns are successful and which are not.

This is also an excellent tool to see if your products or services are spreading virally or not. Facebook Insights is such an impactful tool, due to the word of mouth aspect. Insights additionally helps you gauge just how successful your attempts truly are. Facebook insights not only gauges how successful you are, but also gives you the data about demographics to help you target your traffic for the right audience.

Facebook Platform

The Facebook platform allows programmers to create apps that will work well with their site and enhance the customer’s experience. Creating a fun app is a great way to get people to interact with your page. With Facebook your goal is to create things that your friends want to share with others so your user base can multiply as it goes viral.

Quizzes, surveys, games, and interactive tools are a great way of engaging your fans. You can find some great ideas on the applications page of Facebook, to see which kind of apps will work for your business. Whatever you design needs to help build your brand on the site. Everything you build on your site should be based around building your brand image.

Facebook Polls

Another valuable tool that will assist you in determining other factors of your website is Facebook Polls. You can give a poll to a particular demographic to see if it is wise to launch a product to that demographic before you make the launch. This saves you from time, effort, and disappointment. Facebook Polls is very powerful and will work well because you already have the age, sex, and marital status of your users. This information is an excellent tool to help you focus your efforts on only those who are relevant.

Taking advantage of these free Facebook tools will be a huge benefit to you and will help you build a very successful Facebook business!

By Heather Koenig (c) 2013