You can take advantage of Facebook to increase traffic to your site, generate leads and attain an enviable position on search engine result pages. However, it requires more than coming on board once every week - posting several captivating info, and retiring to your other jobs hoping that leads would start pouring in automatically. Using Facebook judiciously, you can create a ‘buzz’ regarding your small business initiatives and extend invitation for new friends to come in and take a look at the offerings. However, you could also generate a negative result with Facebook if you do not do things the right way.

Facebook’s reach is more than any other social network available on the web – 500 million, and about 200 million among these people are mobile; meaning that they can access their Facebook account from their iPhone, Android and other mobile devices. In the past year (2010), an average Facebook user connected to eighty community pages as well as groups, shared nearly 31 million links, pictures, blog posts and new stories.

It has become crucial for every small business to get featured on Facebook; this is very essential to establish your brand as a trustworthy and available option.

Here are the Do’s and DON’T’s you should adhere to when using Facebook to establish your brand.

DONT’s

• Excess Posting: This is a common mistake among lot many people. This is usually as a result of over-zealousness in the part of small business owners, they simply want to do it once and run off.

• Don’t Hurry Over It : If all you have is barely 20 minutes to devote on Facebook, it may not augur well in establishing your brand on Facebook. A helpful thing you can do is to deploy more hands to your marketing team. Excess-posting would only end up scaring people away from your company – they will eventually ‘unfriend’ you. Don’t overdo it with posts. If all you have is just fifteen minutes on Friday evening to hook on to your Facebook and get things done, ensure that you focus on your most captivating status update in the initial minute. Use the next 12 minutes to look out for new friends as well as new conversations; then, make another captivating post exactly at the 15th minute.

• Don’t Do Anything that Would Unbrand Your Business: If you want to keep up your brand’s integrity on Facebook, it is important that you ‘stay in business mode’ and also ‘keep up good character’. The fastest way to bury your brand is to indulge in ill-mannered acts such as posting inappropriate photos or discussing personal issues. If you spend time on Farmville and Cityville, you are only portraying your business as unserious and unprofessional.

Do’s

• Brand Your Business By Making Your Messages Clear: The message accompaning each status-update/conversation and also with each photo upload - regarding your brand, should be clear, simple and straight forward.

• Stay Consistent: This is critical to your success on Facebook as well as other social networking sites. If it is just one hour you can devote to build your brand on Facebook, share that one hour among the 7-days of the week to enable you stay consistent.

Doing the right things on Facebook would grow your brand name faster than you can imagine, and generate massive leads for you.