Using some of Facebook’s native features will help you organically grow your audience whether using a personal profile or business Page.

1) Hyper target your status updates (personal profile)

When you post any type of status update you now have the option to control exactly who sees it. It’s a privacy feature but can be used for marketing to hyper target your messages.

Why would you want to do this?

If you have a personal profile that contains many different types of ‘friends’ – from work friends to clients to personal friends or relatives, not all your updates will be relevant to all your friends. Using this technique helps provide only relevant info to those who are interested in it, and filters out the unnecessary noise for certain segments of your audience.  You can avoid saturating the wrong people with the wrong message.

Of course Facebook is great for cross-pollination –  some of your friends that you may not consider to be business contacts, especially your ‘weak ties’ could turn out to be potential clients. I’ve personally found unexpected clients in my personal network on who happened to see my blog posts on Facebook. So it is helpful to let your whole circle know what you are up to work-wise, but once you’ve figured out which of your group could be interested in more, you can add them to a more specific list to give them more targeted updates.

Here’s how:

For this to work you have to have your friends grouped into Lists. Under Account at the top right, go to Edit Friends. From there you can create and edit your lists.  Once you’ve got some lists set up, whenever you add a new friend you can immediately add them to the appropriate lists.

Then, when you create a status update you will see a padlock next to the Share button. Click the padlock, then Customize. In the pulldown, select Specific People, then you can enter the name of a friend list.

This seems only to work if you are on Facebook itself – not if you are using a 3^rd party app to update your status (If anyone knows different, please let me know!)

On business pages you can customize updates geographically and by language.

2) Be seen on other’s Pages and Profiles.

When writing your status update you can reference or ‘tag’ other pages and profiles that you friends with. Your post will then show up on that person’s wall. To ‘tag’ someone in your status simply use the @ symbol followed by their profile name. It’s a little awkward using this as a business Page because you personally, as a page admin, have to be a fan of the profile, in order to be able to tag them.

3) Leverage your personal network for your Page

If you are promoting a business page, you can utilize the power of your personal network. Use the Share button on an update from your Page in order to repost that to your personal network. You can control the privacy setting as above. This is an easy way to let your personal network know about your Page without being overly promotional and begging people to ‘like’ you.

4) Make sure you know who you’re talking to

If you run a business page, are you checking the Insights that Facebook provides to make sure that your content and strategy is on-point for your audience? Insights show you the age, sex and location of your fans – information that your regular web analytics on your site cannot reveal. You can also learn which types of content – audio, video, or photo – elicit the most interactions. All of this info can help you tweak your content strategy.