Getting Fans on Facebook

I went to a seminar this week at Salem State’s Enterprise Center about managing social networking for small businesses. Neal Advertising’s Neal Bocian, Chad Foster and Jesse Friedman were great at not only explaining why social networking matters for business, but also incorporating the wide range of questions into their presentation. One business owner asked the question that I am sure most people do after they’ve brought their company’s Facebook page into being: “How do I get Fans for my business?”.
Luckily, Facebook has realized this and now they are testing a beta version of an app that allows creators of Pages to ask potential fans to text that page’s facebook url to a shortcode of 32665 and they can become fans of your company. That is, if their phone is set up to receive texts from Facebook. And currently, if your target audience is T-mobile users, then your are out of luck for the moment. Still, it beats the cost of a Facebook ad campaign.