At Thursday's Business Showcase 2010, a seminar billed Facebook as a way to not only connect with customers, but to interact with them.
With more than 500 million active Facebook users, who average 41 minutes a day on the social network, it's a great, low-cost opportunity for businesses to get and retain customers, said Gus Wagner, president of The Rocket Group, a local marketing firm.
Within 10 miles of Jefferson City, he said, there are 10,300 Facebook users age 18 or older.
One of the approximately 20 seminar attendees was Liz Murphy, the curator of the Churchill Museum in Fulton. About five weeks ago, the museum established a business page on Facebook. Since then, 500 people have linked to it, she said.
"Our museum is starting to use social media as an outreach tool for a regional identity," she said in an interview.
She said it's also helping them to build relationships with museums abroad, such as the historic Cabinet War Rooms, a branch of the Imperial War Museum in London.
The seminar was presented by Wagner and Kara Chinn of Aerodry, a disaster restoration company.
Chinn started Aerodry's Facebook business page, and said she updates it about twice weekly. She said it can take as little as five minutes to post an update and a new photo. In a handout, they said not to "drive yourself crazy" with a business Facebook page, and to limit your time on it to one hour daily or less.
Wagner said one advantage to Facebook is that it's immediate and interactive. For the demonstration, he set up a sample business page, "Brendan's Sub Shop," then said you could post something in the morning listing specials or sales for the day. If customers have questions, you can respond to them throughout the day.
You can leave the page "unpublished" to the web until you're ready to put it online. Then you can let everyone have access to the page, or limit access various ways.
If you choose to, you can let customers post messages and videos to your Facebook "wall" for everyone to see, Wagner said.