Mixing friends with business through social media

The Life: Social networking is effective for businesses, but only the ones who do it right.

Abbas Alidina is teaching a workshop next month on integrating social media into a business.

Whether or not you like Facebook, the site has become a hotbed of activity for companies looking to befriend new customers. Which begs the question: what actually works at drumming up business in the Emirates?

Among UAE companies, 29 per cent allot a slice of their marketing budgets specifically to social networking on sites such as Facebook. It is especially important for small businesses: 54 per cent of smaller companies found new customers through social networks, compared with 33 per cent of large companies, according to a survey commissioned last year by Regus, a company based in Luxembourg that provides meeting rooms as well as both real and virtual office spaces.

Yet converting Facebook friends into cash flow remains a challenge for many companies. In the GCC, where about 5 million residents are already registered on the site, there are certain steps entrepreneurs and business leaders can take to leverage Facebook as a marketing tool, according to experts from Logicks.com, an internet marketing consultancy based in Dubai.

"What a lot of people do is they just get on social media" without a clear strategy, says Abbas Alidina, the founder of Logicks.com, who is teaching at a workshop next month on how to integrate social media into a business.

"It takes a lot of time to be on social media," he says. "So unless you have some direction before you get started, you might end up wasting your time."

Direction is precisely what Mr Alidina and his colleague, Ali Manek, the training director at Logicks.com, recently tried to provide in Abu Dhabi at a monthly meeting for Tamakkan, a group that fosters entrepreneurship and innovation in the Arab world. Here is a sampling of the tips they shared with business leaders in the audience:

Build the Right Profile

Many businesses have created a "group" within Facebook that hundreds of customers have joined. But none of these groups can be displayed on search result sites such as Google or Yahoo, which means companies will gain less exposure online than if they go ahead and set up a "page" within Facebook. "A lot of companies started off with groups and they asked us: 'I have a group. I have 1,000 people in my group. How can I transfer them over [to a page]?' Unfortunately," says Mr Manek, "you can't."

Engage customers

Regularly posting photos, videos, links and questions can all help lure - and keep - customers on a page. Promotions, of course, work as well, although companies should be prepared to step up the game in this digital space. 1-800-Flowers.com developed a creative incentive for attracting more than 127,000 fans to its Facebook portal: reveal an online coupon code for discounts on new flowers, but only to those customers who click the "like" button on its page. "The most important thing is you need to be engaging," says Mr Manek.

Customise both the page …

It's also important to stand out from the competition by branding a page with the business logo and, say, a welcome video, rather than keeping the generic template most Facebook pages are created from. "There's a lot of clutter on Facebook," says Mr Alidina, "and this is one way to stand above the crowd."

… And ads

When Facebook users sign into their account they often see advertisements pop up on the right-hand side of their screen. "Someone is targeting you based on the information that you have on your profile," says Mr Alidina, who notes he has helped a property agency create one particular ad that can be seen only by UAE residents who are over the age of 24, among other parameters. "This is really powerful," he says.