Retaining Your Personality in Facebook

Facebook is critical for the success of your business and maintaining professionalism is vitally important. On the other hand, you don’t want your Facebook persona to be dry and devoid of personality. You want it to be you.

In all relationships, and that includes face-to-face and online relationships, you need to connect with people on a human level in order to successfully establish, nurture, grow, and maintain the connection. In fact, without the personal aspect of the relationship, you won’t get anywhere in business. You need the emotional part to create a lasting connection. When using Facebook for business, if you post information that you feel people will relate to, they will start to interact with you and continue to do so. Of course, at the same time, you need to make sure that whatever you are posting is relevant and appropriate for your specific business. Nobody ever said that business topics have to be dull.

Analyze what people like and try to mimic that: If you take a close look at topics (and particular postings) that are very popular and if you can manage to figure out why they are as popular as they are, you can apply that formula to your own content. At the same time, make sure to pepper your content with some humor and other personal gems of information that you feel other people would enjoy reading. It is an experiment (and an effort) that is worth pursuing because it will most likely pay off for you and your business in the end. Whichever business you are involved in, your angle must be connected to that niche. Your goal should be to offer content that people will like so much that they will automatically want to share with others. At the same time, you need to make sure that you share some of yourself in your online offerings. That is exactly what people will relate to.

Make sure that your content matches your ultimate goal: It is very important that the type of message that you are sharing is a perfect match for the end result that you have in mind. In other words, whatever you are selling, it is critical that your content eventually leads to that sale. Of course, a great deal will need to happen before you get to the the ultimate goal. First, you will be building your relationships and strengthening your credibility and reputation. In that process, you need to interact with people in a way that makes them feel that they are really getting a great deal out of the relationship with you. You need to allow them to know you on some level. The selling part will most likely not come until sometime down the road. It is ok to deviate to a point from your typical topics; however, you need to always make sure to maintain some tie to what you are trying to accomplish and what you are offering. With each installment of content, you should make sure that there is a little more of what you are trying to sell (in as discrete a manner as possible). There needs to be a balance between hitting someone over the head with it and being so subtle that the other person will never understand what you are driving at.

Be selective about who you choose to connect with: There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to who and how many people to allow into your social media circle. There is the group of people who feel that the more connections you have, the better. It is not important if you don’t know all of your connections or if you ever speak with all of them. The other group chooses quality over quantity. In this group, you tend to allow people in with whom you have a genuine connection and with whom you feel that you will be able to share a relationship that is mutually beneficial. You will be able to help each other in  your businesses in some way. When you have high-quality relationships through Facebook, your personality will factor into the relationship very decidedly. The more interesting the relationship is, the more fruitful it will also be.

Conclusion

From the reader’s perspective, there is nothing worse than content that is boring and with which you have no ability to connect. People will not connect with you (in fact they won’t be able to connect with you) if you don’t have something in common. It can be any number of things, such as an experience that you both had, a passion, etc. Always remember to be sincere and to let who you really are shine through when you are interacting with people on Facebook. Your business will gain tremendously through that approach.

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