By Alyse Speyer, Web Success Team

There are a ton of articles on the power of Facebook for business and how to leverage social media. This is because Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time on social networks, a 43% increase from last year. Still for some businesses, marketing on Facebook can be overwhelming. Here are a few best practices and tips that will help you develop a seamless Facebook marketing strategy:

Find the Face of Your Brand

To keep your personal life separate from your business, you’ll need to find someone to be your brand ambassador. This person should represent your business. If this person is you, then there is no harm in having two Facebook accounts. Hide your personal account from search and be careful of friend overlap. Remember, users will associate this account with your business.

If you are creating a new account from scratch, you will need to find your clients and customers. Import all your addresses into a new Gmail account and use this account to register your brand Facebook profile. Facebook will automatically find your clients and suggest them as friends.

Create a Facebook Page

Facebook pages are a great way to drive traffic to your website and engage with your target audience. Be creative and don’t forget SEO. Your page name and info should have at least one keyword. Page name is one of the strongest ranking aspects for Facebook search.

Once you have at least 25 fans, you can create a vanity URL and set a username for your page. A vanity URL makes it easier for consumers to find your page by changing the URL link from “428737932010?ref=sgm” to “yourbusinessname.”

Promote Your Page and Get Fans

Now that you have a profile and a page, here are a few quick tips on how to promote it to capture more fans and higher levels of engagement:

1. Use your brand ambassador profile page to connect with users. Join relevant groups and fan pages. Participate in the conversations there and ask members to join your page.

2. Post interesting links, pictures, videos and other media. Visuals are often better received than plain text updates. Don’t mimic the content on your site.

3. Offer fans incentives for joining or interacting with the page by providing whitepapers or discount coupons.

4. Send updates once a month or every other week to your fans. Be mindful of frequency and quality. You don’t want to send an update that harbors minimal value to those reading it.

Branch Out

Be social on other networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Add social buttons to your website for users to follow you on their preferred channel. Don’t forget to make each of your networks unique in the content and incentives offered. Give users a reason to follow each of your channels.

About the Author: Alyse Speyer is an online marketer, social media strategist and works for the  Web Success Team. You can follow them @websuccess or join the Web Success Team Facebook Page