Business Folks – Are You Using Facebook, FourSquare?

Hey, just a quick question for you people running a “local” business. (Where is local? Well, where are you? That’s local.)

Question: Have you gotten your business on Facebook, and put deals up on Google Places and FourSquare?

What’s FourSquare? Facebook – for a business? !!

The basic answer to “Why?” is…The world is becoming more socially connected. If your customers enjoy the service or food or clothing you sell, they’ll let their friends know. This can and DOES lead to more business for you.

FourSquare – Your customers can “check in” when they walk into your store or shop. Their friends see that update. (Think about this for a minute or two – it’s profoundly socially powerful.) You can automatically enable a discount the first time a customer does check in, or every 5th or 8th time they check in. (Wow, right? !!)

Facebook – Nope! It is not just like Friendster or Myspace. It’s grown up AMAZINGLY! They now have Business Pages. Business should NOT be done on a personal profile. (Meaning, I am http://facebook.com/tim.junck – and I need to keep any business talk low-key there. But build a “Fan Page”, which is meant for business use, and you’re off to the races.)

The power is – people can “like” your business page. Again, think about having 250 or 950 people that like your business when a new person arrives to view your page. And Facebook will tell them how many of THEIR friends like your page.

So if you visit a business page for a restaurant, and 17 of your friends like the page (implying that they like the business, the food, the experience) you are likely to not overthink the situation – you’ll be likely to go eat at that restaurant.

And do you know about Google Places? Your business probably exists there, whether you have visited their site or not. Again, what information is over there about your business? Add photos, encourage customers to fill out a review, and put a coupon on there and you’ll get much more positive results from your listing on that site.

(And do you know that Google loves to display Google Places listings that are “filled in” and kept current? It’s a quick way to appear HIGH on a google search results page.)

If you have a “local” business, what do you think about these topics? I’d love to hear your thoughts.