Five Tips for Facebook Marketing -- But in social media, one size does not fit all, and five tips won't work for everyone

I'm a sucker for quick tips, but increasingly, I've found that many of the tips I come across are not necessarily appropriate for our clients.

It's not that the tips are wrong or stupid. Just not right for the way our clients operate, their budgets or their goals. After all, our tips may not be appropriate for other situations and clients, too.

With more than 200 million users, Facebook represents a great opportunity to reach an engaged audience.

So I checked out "5 tips for optimizing your Facebook marketing" in BtoBOnline only to find that the first tip was obvious -- "Have a strong presence."

And yet, many companies do not have a regular strategy posting updates and interesting content. Most companies are not enlisting their employees to sign up as fans of their corp. Facebook page so that their friends and people doing Facebook searches can find your company.

The next two -- "do some advertising" on Facebook and "create an application" -- make sense for consumer companies, but I don't think make as much sense for B2B companies. (I admit I don't really dig widgits.) And, yes, I realize that the article I'm citing is from BtoBOnline.

I think "Throw an Event" works for most B2Bs, though I've got a friend who runs a marketing company that uses Facebook to announce wine-and-cheese events at his office. Since he's half-way across the country, I don't know if these event notices work; I'm sure they do, but you have to pick select markets to make it work.

Of the five tips, I think the most important one is "Syndicate your content." For example, you can use your Notes page to import blog posts or the My Del.icio.us app to imporant bookmarks (if you've saved bookmarks). You can also use Simply RSS to bring all your RSS feeds to your Fan page. By the way use get RSS on Facebook, click here.

So, I'd mark this a 1.5 out of 5, which, scored on a sliding scale basis, is actually quite good.