If you are reading this I assume you are a facebook user and realize that one fifth of the traffic of the www comes to this one site everyday. Question is therefore, how to tap this traffic for profit? What do you do beyond setting up your profile and picture?

Now since I am a big user of facebook and get lots of business from here, I would advise your first step be to start adding friends. How do you do that? Look for the search bar on top of facebook and type in your interest area in it. Let’s say you are into bike repair… so type in harley davidson. Plenty of ‘people’, ‘groups’ and ‘pages’ will be thrown up against your search.

Now click on one of groups or one of the pages that has a large following. Scroll down that page till you see the members / fans. Right click on “show all” to open in a new window. What you are seeing now are all the people who like your interest area which is why they subscribed to that group / fan-page in the first place!

Your task is to “Add as a friend” about 40-50 of them everyday. It takes about 10 minutes to do so. And while you do, copy-paste a one-line “personal message” that helps them associate with you. Else they will wonder about your motives behind befriending and you won’t start a relationship of trust. I use a line like, “Hi xxx, looks like we have xxxxxx in common! I specialize in teaching people to get profitable online and could put my 20 years of business experience to your good use. Let’s connect!” Obviously you’ll make relevant changes.

Once friends accept you, you can message them, chat with them, or invite them to games or whatever else may be of common interest. This is why your profile set up is important so your interests are known. And your choice of friends should be of your target group, to aid business.

Concurrently you can start to join groups in your interest area. The advantage of doing so is you can post ads and articles on the wall and discussion boards for other members to see. If they see value in what you say they will come to your site and that’s traffic! You can also start your own group and invite your friends to it. This way you will be able to message them with your ideas and links and come across as a leader who fosters interactions. Do not be too salesy in all of this… keep to moderation and let everyone enjoy your company.

Facebook’s top scoring point over most social networks is the exchange of videos and photos. Use this for business. You can record directly or upload videos from your computer. Then you can tag them with names of influential people in your community so lots of people may see them. For instance if you are into bikes, you could tag a picture of your latest bikes to twenty prospects and the photo / video will be visible on their profile page with your note asking for their comment or some such message … so it does not look like spam.

The walls are another place you can attach links to your site and articles. Do make sure your links are valuable and you don’t turn people off with outright sales messages.

In case your business is having an event, you can create an event using the icons and invite all your friends to it so the message spreads virally. Just be sure you are harnessing this platform with ethics and providing stuff people like to see. Else you may have to keep adding friends and may never have a relationship with any. So be smart about it and enjoy!