Anyone who is in business marketing anything to the public should be an active member of the FaceBook community and be aggressively engaged in tagging photos. This is one of the most valuable and inexpensive means to keep your name on the minds of potential customers. This concept works for almost any business imaginable and is easy to implement. You can start with just a few friends and expand as time permits. The important thing is to just start.

Lets say you’re in the new car business. This presents an excellent opportunity to make new contacts for FaceBook. When a potential client walks in your dealership, whether you make a sale or not, find out if he is on FaceBook. You can just ask him outright or just get his name and do a FaceBook search later. Invite him to be your friend citing notification of the newest rebate programs, new model releases, etc. It wont take long to build a list of folks that are interested in new automobiles.

It gets more interesting. When you make a sale, be sure to get a picture of your client with his new ride. (You do keep an inexpensive digital camera in your desk drawer don’t you?)  Go to your facebook profile and post the picture with a description something like, “Just put Joe Driver behind the wheel of a brand new Camaro!” If you have 200 FaceBook friends you just let everyone of them know that you sold a new Camaro to Joe Driver. Now here’s the really exciting part. Let’s say your new to FaceBook and you only have 5 friends but Joe Driver has 1500 friends. If you tag the photo you just posted with Joe Driver’s name, you just sent a notice to all 1500 of Joe Driver’s friends. If Joe Driver has a wife and she has a facebook page you can tag both of them and potentially double your exposure. Truly amazing and it only took you an extra five minutes to do it.

Suppose you run a tire store and you’re sponsoring a car wash for the local cheerleaders to raise money to go to summer cheer camp. Naturally you’d want to get pictures of the group washing cars in your driveway. In today’s world, no self respecting cheerleader would be without a FaceBook page. If you get their names you can easily send the cheerleaders an invitation to join your facebook page. Then, a few days later, post the picture(s) with a brief description of what’s happening and include tags for the individuals where appropriate. Assuming you tagged 10 people and they averaged 300 friends each, you just put you name in front of 3000 people.

I recently photographed a local high school musical group performing at a function I attended. I only had the name of one of the performers but I posted some of the pictures on FaceBook and tagged her on one of them. The next day I got a request from one of the other members of the group asking permission to tag the photo with her name. The following day I had requests from 3 other members wanting to tag their photo as well. I didn’t really have time to check how many friends they had but that was 4 more FaceBook contacts that were actually asking to be tagged. Amazing huh?

The principle above can be applied to any online marketing plan with very little adaptation. Some business will benefit more than others. Some businesses would need to use a little discretion when posting. For example, if you’re selling wedding gowns you would probably want to wait until after the ceremony before you actually posted a picture of the bride in her gown.