Is Facebook a Fad?

Why is Facebook relevant to my business?

Social media isn’t a fad anymore. It’s a FUNDAMENTAL shift in how we communicate. Start looking at social media as a way to draw in traffic, traffic, and more traffic. Why would you give up a free opportunity to remind people about your business or service? Facebook gets more traffic than any other social media network or tool, period. If you need more convincing, watch the first minute of this 4 minute video on Socialnomics.

Won’t people eventually get bored of Facebook?

Sure, eventually. Maybe someday. But this isn’t your MySpace or Friendster. If this platform were a country it would be the 4th largest, with over 520 million users. And Facebook has grown to this size in less than a 7 years. Let the genius of Facebook, the most successful business of our time sink in with you. The innovations we’re seeing now I believe are just the beginning, and the impact that Facebook will have on the economy is also not completely understood.

But if I get on Facebook, I have no privacy!

Well, yes and no. Aside from all the controversy around Facebook’s privacy policy, when it comes to how your information is shared with other regular users, Facebook has some crazy detailed settings. No other social network has such granular privacy options under the Privacy Settings page.

A crazy person wants to friend me, what should I do?
I use two different tactics together to control what people can see and read about me.

APPROACH A: This takes less work: Be okay with being disliked and be wary about who you connect to directly. Ignore the request. You’re not friends. It’s okay to reject them. I’m vigilant about this. (A couple years ago I deleted about 500 people.) They can go and “Like” your business page. That’s the appropriate connection anyway.

APPROACH B: This takes a bit of initial setup. (About 20 minutes)

1. First, create a “New List” for your Friends. It’s a gray button on your Friends page. Call this list “Filter”, “Crazy People” or whatever you like. Add people that are already your friends that belong to this list.
2. Second, under Accounts go to Privacy Settings. Click on “Customize Settings” link. Consider the options on this page. What information do you want to hide from Crazy People? Select Custom from that drop down, and under “Hide This From” type the name of the list you just created (eg. Crazy People).
3. You’re done! Now, any time you get a new request from some crazy person who wants to add you, you’ll have the option at the time of ALSO adding them to a list. Don’t forget to add them to the list! In all, I’d say only 100 or so of my Friends list can see everything about me on Facebook. The rest can’t see everything.