Social network marketing for businesses can be an intimidating thing. Here are some tips to help with using Facebook to market your business.

Create a business page for your business – don’t just use your personal page.

You should feel free to “advertise” on your personal page, but there are some tools that facebook provides to business pages that make it easier to understand how many people are viewing your pages and posts. As with every part of marketing and advertising, both online and offline, knowledge is power.

Once you’ve created a business page, post on that page as your business.

You can change whether you’re posting as yourself or as your business page up in the upper right hand corner by choosing your business from the downward facing arrow.

Post regularly.

It doesn’t have to be every day, although that would be better. What’s important, though, is that when potential customers come to look at your facebook page, they see that you’ve been posting regularly, even if it’s just once a month. Better once a month than six months ago.

Feel free to share related content on your business page from other pages.

In fact, it’s a great idea to do this – the page or person you share from will see that you’re sharing their content, and so can other people. It’s a way to increase interaction. Also, it’s often easier than writing your own post.

If you hate doing it, don’t do it.

This may sound counter intuitive, but it does no one any good if you’re posting even though you hate doing it. It means you’re spending time on the parts of your business that you don’t like instead of the parts that you enjoy, and ultimately that’s going to wear on you. You can hire someone to manage your social network marketing for you, or, if you prefer a d0-it-yourself approach, consider using a management tool like hootsuite, where you can schedule your posts in advance, and therefore sit down and write a couple week’s worth of content all at once and schedule it to post at a certain time during the day.

Please note that hiring someone to do your social network marketing for you generally means that they’ll be doing a lot more research and interaction than simply scheduling posts for you.