You see them all the time – plenty of articles stating “5 ways Facebook can help your biz”. Zuckerberg himself is very big these days on getting his idea into commercial and advertising space.

The only problem is that these so-called help blogs are either technical or time-consuming and only work if you implement them fully. For your average small-time company owner, who barely has time for the monthly accounts on an old computer, he barely reads the first paragraph before he moves on.

Let’s ask a simple question: Can Facebook be good for a small business? The answer maybe “yes”, especially if the enterprise is offering a product or service that can be valued at a social or community level. One such example is a local restaurant.

If yes, then the next question is “how” or “why”? For three reasons.

Yup – the thumbs up sign is often the key to all this. In fact, Facebook experts are so keen to explain the wow things that can be done today on the site – not just date of birth or where you studied – that they forget to dwell on this brilliant concept. So to recap……

If I press “like” on what you have posted, then all my friends will have the opportunity to see the same text. And if one of them also presses, so all their friends can read the original site. And so on. In other words, one clever set of words can go viral, rapidly, and for the cost of 60 seconds of thought.

Does it work?

I have a client in Jerusalem, providing a familiar service but in an original format. We have been talking about his website for several months now. The content is more or less finalised, but he is waiting for somebody to complete the set up.

Meanwhile, he opened a Facebook account in a few moments, has been uplifting pictures and ensures that there are several new postings every week. He is well past the hundred mark in friends, of whom over half are genuine customers.

Is it a professional site? No. Any advertising? A long way off for now. Could it look so much better? You bet. However……….

However, this same client now has a business. He has begun to build his own small customer base. He is deriving income.

Now that is a practical example for other new and small firms to follow.