Build a Facebook Profile You Can Be Proud Of
- Written by Neil Patel on September 19th, 2007 |
- 51 Comments »
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Facebook seems to be the hot social network these days that people of all ages are getting involved with. If you don’t currently have a Facebook account, I highly recommend that you go and signup now. If you already have an account, it is time to start using it to your advantage. Facebook is not just a place where you can connect with your friends, it can actually be used to further your personal brand and career. Here is how you can use Facebook to its full potential:
Don’t stay in your circle - You need to get away from just interacting with your high school or college friends and start interacting with people within your industry or other industries that you want to get into. An easy way to do this is to join groups that interest you as well as make friends with people that you want to get to know.
Fill out your profile (fully) - The best profile on Facebook is a complete one. This doesn’t mean you should fill out your name and contact information, it just means you need to complete all the fields available.
Don’t be shy - The purpose of Facebook is to connect and interact with other members, so don’t be shy! Interact with other members by writing on their wall, commenting on pictures, asking your friends questions, and most importantly telling all your friends happy birthday. Doing all these things will help others to get to know who you actually are instead of just knowing your name.
Spice up your profile - Facebook Applications lets you spice up your profile by adding things that interest you. For example, I added a YouTube application to my profile which allows me to embed YouTube videos onto my profile for others to see. Now if you are lame like me you can place funny videos on your profile or if you are smart like Robert Scoble you can add videos of yourself that are related to your profession. By taking the Scoble route more people will learn more about you and what you are good at.
Build it, and they will NOT come - This isn’t the Field of Dreams, you actually have to market yourself on Facebook to become popular. In most cases this is done from interaction, which I talked about above, but you can also do things like adding photos of yourself and other Facebook members. When you do this the other people that you tagged in the photo will get emailed, thus increasing the number of people who see you on Facebook. Some of the other things to consider are creating a group on Facebook as well as creating your own application, which could be distributed to all your friends.
Keep your profile up-to-date - If you don’t keep your profile up-to-date it will start dying down. By keeping it up-to-date it will gain more traffic and more people will get to know you.
This is pretty much how I leveraged Facebook so far and it has worked for me. I haven’t gotten too many job offers from it, but I did get to meet new people within my industry.
That’s funny that you mention this because I had just put out two posts in a row trying to get people on facebook. I find it to be a much better platform than LinkedIn or MySpace because of the profiles.
I agree, the best part about Facebook is that there isn’t any spam!
“Facebook is not just a place where you can connect with your friends, it can actually be used to further your personal brand and career”
I am not sure it does either….
Not sure if you use Facebook, but you can easily add your high school or college so that you can connect with others that you know. You can also import your aim buddy list which makes it easy to connect with friends.
As for furthering your personal brand and career, when you network with new individuals it opens up opportunities. Such as when you network with individuals in your industry you may meet people who are interested in hiring you. Plus by networking more people will know about you and what you do, thus increasing your personal brand.
I absolutely agree with this, Neil.
Re: career - Just as one example, I was able to get a writing job because one of my friend’s friends on Facebook noticed my profile and contacted me about possible work.
P.S. Thanks for the great information on today’s webinar!
Facebook does automatic blogging for you. Your Facebook mini news feed publishes your photo uploads, your relationship status changes (be careful), events that you are going to, groups you’ve joined, comments you left on other Facebook pages.
These activities show up on the home pages of all your Facebook friends–that’s the value of Facebook for me. Automatic blogging gives me more time to work on manual blogging
Good point! One thing to note that if you modify your privacy settings your friends will not see all of your changes via the mini news feed.
I’m not a developer so I’ve not looked into creating an application but I’ve certainly had a lot of fun with the RSS feeds.
Now my Blog updates are posted on my Facebook profile, my status changes go and update my blog, all my friends notices come to me via twitter so I get their updates immediately wherever I am on my mobile via SMS message. And my twitters update my blog and my facebook.
And so easy to do.
I’d post a how-to if I thought people were interested?
m.
If you don’t mind, how did you do it? Also have you noticed any benefits from it?
In Facebook you’ll see your notifications. Here you’ll find an RSS link. I use Wordpress and it’s easy to add multiple RSS feeds.
Adding Twitter is just as simple.
As for posting back to Facebook you can either go to notes and use the Import Notes setting to point the notes to your blog’s feed.
I’ve also been playing with YahooPipes and REGEX to change “MichaelRose” to “I”.
TwitterFeeds is also a good one, you can watch any RSS feeds and turn them into Twitter channels. And again these all have RSS feeds which can be integrated into your blog, reader, whatever.
I might just document it fully in a post actually… it’d be great for me to remember what I did!
As for effect, I’ve not got metrics if that’s what you mean. I’ve a small universe to serve at the moment, only handfuls of people, but I’m going to consolidate all my online presences soon and start blogging more seriously. At the moment my blog is just an aggregator of all that stuff. Facebook is the main “way in” for friends and hopefully more and more will read the blog which has deeper stuff in it.
HTH
m.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks Neil, Very good pointers..
This article is infact a spam. It’s encouraging you to provide more information about yourself, so they can deliver more targeted ads to you Eventually. “Fill out your profile (fully)” really means “Tell us more about you so that we can sell you junk”
The purpose is actually not to spam but to provide value and help people. For example if people see that I am a blogger and have questions regarding blogging or need help, I would gladly do it for free.
The main benefit of this is that people actually get to know who you are instead of a face in the crowd.
I’m pretty new to Facebook, after spending years on Friendster.
I hope you like Facebook. There are tons more advantages of being on there instead compared to Friendster.
Facebook has also allowed me to create groups of my own to network more than just my friends. I teach a girls’ class in church on Sunday mornings, and I’ve found that facebook lets me know what’s going on in their lives, keeps me up to date on whatever might happen. We have a group together on facebook that lets us remind each other about service projects or certain bible studies. Also, it’s a great forum for a more unihibited discussion. The girls will post difficult questions that we all weigh in on and then we discuss those in class.
Also, facebook applications keep you invested in facebook. You come back for scrabulous or the mafia game going on, which in turn introduces you to new people who also want to play a little scrabble or mafia. I’ve met people in Australia and people in my own city.
So, how come you don’t have a link to your own Facebook profile on your blog?
Good point! Will make sure I include it in the new design as well as links to other profiles such as LinkedIn.
The problem with Facebook is that most of the functionality is in plug-ins and if you keep adding them to your profile, it ends up looking really messy. When people send me virtual fish, drinks, games and so on my choice is either to install a new plug-in and show them to the whole world, cluttering up my brand; or to say ‘no’ to my friends and contacts more often. And even though it’s only a virtual gift, it still feels rude to decline it.
I also decline most of the invitations I get from my friends. I am pretty sure that Facebook doesn’t send back notices to them that you declined the invitation.
As for virtual gifts, I would probably keep them because your friend spent $1 to buy it.
Interesting post, I have Facebook but haven’t done much with it yet. I need to spend some time investigating it and looking into its potential.
I hear facebook has a max for the amount of friends you can have. Either way, it’s a great way to see your friends, and their friends, and their friends, etc.
Never knew that, I guess I will have to figure out what that number is.
As a early adapter to hard core Myspace fan, I must say that the tide has turned. Facebook makes everything that much easier and the connections are genuine and the spam is almost non existent. Great post and now I’m gunna go log in to spice up the page a little.
I thank you for posting this article, Neil. I want very much to use Facebook to market my website. Do you have suggestions or is there Facebook tutorials a starter like me can use? I have read all the comments and yet I do not know how to apply what is being said. Thank you
Hope this helps
http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page7430.cfm
Neil,
Thank you for the useful tips. I’ve been thinking about using Facebook to create buzz about my blog, but hadn’t sat down and noodled with it yet. This really helps.
I’ve been mulling Facebook and other social networks of late and have yet to decide on whether it’s really worth the time and effort your steps require - especially if you’re not in the US…
According to Alexa, only 28.8% of their traffic comes from the U.S. Because of this I highly recommend using it.
Hmmm. Alexa isn’t the bastion of accuracy it used to be, but two thirds is significant.
So one thing to also keep in mind is the searchability of your facebook profile. If searching for your name comes up with 300+ matches, you may want to differentiate a bit or make sure you’re well linked from other profiles/groups.
Case in point: “Neil Patel” gives me 310 profile matches, mostly in the London network. Facebook doesn’t do a good job of filtering (in my opinion). Luckily, you’re not too hard to find through other friends’ lists. You could always call youself Neil “Quicksprout” Patel or Neil “SEO” Patel, but that probably looks cheesy
This is a fine idea but Facebook is very strict about people’s names. They don’t allow siLLy CapITalISatIoN, or ‘quirky’ inserts for middle names.
All the name changes get validated (by a human apparantly) and it takes a while to do the process.
Best to join lots of groups and be really active.
As for ‘filtering’ I think you’re might want to check why your Neil Patels are from London. Is it perhaps showing your networks first? I find a lot of results come up Brighton and it prioritises that because I’m in the Brighton network.
I think a smart move would be to join lots of networks
can facebook be used to improve the brand of enterprises? (an idea for you to blog on)
It can. A lot of companies are doing this through Facebook applications or groups.
This link to a set of talks on “Web 2 and Web 3 Platforms transforming commerce and marketing” has been very illuminating.
It looks like companies are going to shift more towards “Branded Utility” (widgets, plugins, applications and platforms) rather than just sticking to the old (Web1.0) banners&eyeballs approach.
http://www.wystc.org/Docs/2007/03_Media_PR/Video_NextGenTech.php4#DP
If I use Facebook applications to spice up my profile, can I customize them?
Some applications can be customized, but not all.
Excellent article - thanks. I’m just getting into Facebook and I’m going to use your tips right now.
Great post Neil… I have had a facebook accout for a while. As a matter of fact you and I just became friends on facebook and I am trying to learn more about getting the full benefits from Facebook.
Thanks for the post.
Well it’s great to get out and socialise in Facebook, but there’s a issue of how much details to disclose. I think it’s a privacy issue and it would be better if we did not disclose previous work information and personal photos … but oh well… so many people are doing it!
There is going to be a privacy issue with a lot of social sites. Each individual needs to decide how much they are willing to share.
After reading this I have stepped up my Facebook page and began to see it for its full potential. Nice post Neil.
From another Neil… haha.
Glad the post encouraged you to step up your profile.
Now only if your last name was the same as mine.