Converge Weekly

Charles Nelson, president of Sprinkles Cupcakes, doesn’t have a Facebook profile. Nelson, who works seven days a week, has no time for chatting online with Facebook friends.

But Nelson is logged on to Facebook all the time. That’s because more than 70,000 people have declared themselves fans of Sprinkles’ Facebook page, which is at facebook.com/sprinkles.

Each day on the site, Sprinkles announces a secret word, such as “ganache” or “bunny,” and the first 25 or 50 people to show up at any of its five stores around the country and whisper that word get a free cupcake.

“On Facebook, we can ask our customers what’s the next location they want,” Nelson said. “What do they think of our next flavor? It’s an amazing way to communicate with our fans.”

Facebook is not just for friends anymore. The free social networking site — blocked in some workplaces as a potential time-waster — is increasingly becoming an inexpensive marketing tool for small businesses.

Sprinkles is among a growing number of small businesses taking advantage of a relatively new program on Facebook, one that allows them to claim their name, become visible even to folks who aren’t on the site, and stay in close contact with their customers. The business, in effect, can act like any other person on Facebook, posting status updates and seeing what its fans are doing.

Facebook doesn’t break out figures for small businesses but says it has 1.4 million business “pages,” with an average of 100 fans per page. Businesses need to go where their customers are and, increasingly these days, that’s on Facebook and other social media sites, analysts said. More than 300 million people have signed up for Facebook, and half of them visit the site every day.

“Over the past two years, we’ve seen this increasing uptick in businesses realizing that their customers are on Facebook,” said Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization product marketing. “If they can create a presence in Facebook that allows customers to connect with them, it can be a way to strengthen that connection and also to find new customers.”

Plenty of other sites are also wooing small local businesses. The review site Yelp, Citysearch and a host of Yellow Pages sites are all making a push.

Businesses typically don’t stick to one site such as Facebook. Instead, they spread their presence across the social media landscape, including MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Increasingly, these sites connect with one another so that a status update on Facebook becomes a tweet on Twitter, or a blog post could be pushed out to several sites.

“Companies don’t have a lot of resources to create their own Web site,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a social media analyst at Altimeter Group. “Using these sites where the customers already are in their communities makes a lot of sense.”

Helping businesses, Facebook pages frequently turn up in Google search results.

That’s important, said Avichal Garg, a former Google employee who now owns PrepMe, a company that offers online test preparation.

His Facebook page drives traffic and sales because “it ranks well in search and people use search for companies they haven’t done business with before,” Garg said in an e-mail, adding that Facebook has brought in about 5 percent of his new business. “Facebook is a trusted domain so people click on it and when they see the faces behind the company name, they know we’re legitimate.”

Social media help companies take control of “the Google resume,” said Adrian Lurssen, a vice president at JD Supra, an online legal site. When people search for a company — or for what a company sells — it wants its site to turn up in the first 10 results, or the first page Google delivers.

Nelson of Sprinkles agrees. Fans of the firm’s cupcakes shower Sprinkles with praise — and word-of-mouth buzz. Their Facebook friends all see when they comment on Sprinkles’ page.

You’re looking for customers but you’re really looking for advocates,” Nelson said. “We’ve never had paid advertising in five years of being open.”

Using Facebook

Perhaps the most compelling reason for a business to get on Facebook is the likelihood that its customers are already there — and talking about it. Businesspeople offer some tips on using social media properly:

– Use your expertise to promote your business. Jeweler Janet Rothstein writes about the danger of unsanitary ear piercings, or the effects on jewelry sales of the price of gold, and finds that those posts increase traffic to her sites — and her store, J. Rothstein & Co.

– Be careful about putting too much personal information on the site. Ed Poll, who runs LawBiz Management Co. and has a page at facebook.com/LawBizManagement, is circumspect. “When you go on the Internet, it’s permanent. There’s no such thing as deletion. You really have to be careful what you say,” he said.

– Remember that ultimately, Facebook owns the site and can change the terms of service.

Earlier this year, Facebook decided to revoke certain rights to generic names such as “wine,” or “tea,” or “beach.” Although Facebook said those URLs were largely populated with spam, some were legitimate.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-facebook-smallbiz27-2009oct27,0,7371262.story?track=rss