For a while now Facebook has allowed you to create a business page. I’m not talking about “profiles”, i’m talking about public pages, where you have the opportunity to promote your company, or anything else, for that matter.

I created one for BrightCherry earlier today, and invited the rest of the gang, along with a few of my friends. I also told them to invite their friends; hopefully the fan base will slowly increase by a snowball effect.

Every man and his dog have a Facebook account, so it’s a good way of generating good, local publicity. The good thing about these pages is that they are “public”- you don’t need special invitations, anyone can join, and Google even caches them, which means it’s possible for the pages to get organic traffic from search engines.

Here’s BrightCherry’s Facebook profile. Please feel free to become a fan and also tell a friend (bet you weren’t seeing that one coming)

You can create your own page here.

Ultimately, social marketing is all about spreading the word, whatever it maybe.

I won’t go into too much detail of the usefulness of social media because the issue has been talked about to the max. But any internet company that isn’t embracing social media really is stuck in the stone ages, and should seriously think about getting with the times.

As soon as we launched, we spread the word through our Facebook accounts, and we instantly got the response we needed. We utilised Facebook with 2 objectives.

• 1) to quickly and efficiently get the opinions of our company image (the website) from our friends and family
• 2) to spread the word of our available services. It’s amazing how many people know people that need websites.

We got the feedback we needed and made necessary changes based on what we heard. Secondly, we’ve managed to accumulate a handful of solid leads. Mission accomplished.

Social media is awesome.