Customer Engagement: Entice, engage and invite customers to your business with a variety of marketing intiatives – promotions, contests, events, sales, special offers – which can all be advertised on your facebook page.

Drive Web Traffic: By including a link to your website on you Facebook page you are encouraging fans, friends and interesteds parties to visit your website, therefore increasing your web traffic – remember the more people to your website the better.

Reputation Management: Having a facebook account not only allows you to “speak directly” to your customers but it also allows you to see what they think of you, your business and may offer suggestions for improvement.

Qcquisition of New Customers: Find consumers who you may never have had contact with previously. Facebook has the ability to open up a new world of customers to you.

Generation of Business Leads: Not only only Facebook expose you to new customers and clients but also possible business leads. Review other profiles and find out if they are the right people for you to target for business leads. Open your business world up to the possibilities of Facebook.

Client/Customer Retention: Facebook allows you to connect with your clients or customers and when they feel appreciated they are more likely to stay with your business. Increase your customer retention rates by listening to what your customers want. Facebook can be used as a great interface for conversation.

Access to Social Networking: In today’s world if you are not online you are serious lacking the cool factor. Most people go straight to the internet when they are searching for information and with the increasing popularity of Facebook most people are heading to Facebook if they want to know more about a person or business. You never know who is using Facebook and with the boom in social marketing your networking opportunities are endless.

Viral Marketing: Viral Marketing is word of mouth on Supersonic speed. Take advantage of Facebook and get your name out there fast and to lots of people. Create excitements about your products which will make people not being able to exist wanting to be your facebook friend.

Brand Awareness: Do you know how your customers and your clients view your business? Brand awareness is a vital element of marketing and is used to measure your client’s knowledge of your business. Tell people  more about your business by using the socially accepted facebook. It is easy to use and people will like reading about your business and your brand and how it came to be.

Customer Feedback: Facebook is a comfortable and user friendly platform that people are happy to use which is why it is a great way to get customer feedback on elements of your business. Use your wall to ask questions and see what responses you get. It also gives you the opportunity to speak directly to customers and clients about any of their comments.

Business Hunamisation: Put a face, or many faces to your business. This will allow your current and future customers to see you and know exactly who they’re talking to when they are dealing with you. Placing photos of company events, employees performing their jobs or happy customer pictures  will humanise your business to those looking for your goods or services.

Targeted Advertising Option: Facebook also has an option for businesses who are looking to reach an exact audience and connect with real people. This is a service which you will have to pay for on Facebook which is quick and easy, targeted to your exact demographic and tracked so you can get results.

Solid User Focused Companies: Although Facebook has been around since 2004 it’s growth and popularity is unlike anything before it. From having 1 million users in Decemeberr 2004 to having over 400 million users is phenomenal and something that your business should be a part of.

Let Your Friends Know They’re Special: Showing your friends that they are special to you will benefit your business in many ways. You can do this with regular updates on your new products or services., special offers, running competitions and creating a competition where people feel comfortable to contribute. These will all let them know you are aware of them and you appreciate their support.

Cost – you will save a lot of money and be very eco-friendly when you decide not to rent an office, this saving can be used in other areas of your business, like marketing, better web-site or better IT.

Family – I suspect that many of you work from home because of your family, it allows you to be around when your kids come home from school or look after relatives, while still earning a living.

Commuting – again a very eco-friendly approach and saves money and time. This time can be spend on real business activities. It certainly will enhance your work/life balance and make your small business or start-up more cost efficient form day one.

Freedom – this may especially appeal to you if you like to work at odd hours, it will suit your lifestyle. Dress as you like it, so you will be more comfortable.

Healthy – if you work in an office and one of you gets ill, soon all the others are down too – not if you work from home.

Teamwork – chances are you need to work with other people, use online technology to collaborate with your colleagues and other team workers – they too may work from home.

Domestic Life – you’ll be around when the plumber finally turns up or other trades people. You can enjoy your local life more – by having a social network in your village rather than at work – this could be the return of the local community.

Small Business Infrastructure – use online technology to keep your data and work safe at all times without that you have to do anything, build your own virtual Small Business Team to timeshare professionals like yourself. Outsource to make your business more professional and scalable.

Meetings – even bigger businesses use coffee shops to meet – they often have WiFi – so can you. Make sure you plan them well, so you can be efficient with your time.

Eco-Friendly – you will only heat your home, no other workplace needs to be heated or air-conditioned, your energy efficiency goes up, no travel to work – so you reduce your carbon footprint enormously just by working from home.

You will need some pretty good reasons to go to an office and work. Especially for small business and start-up business. Personal business, you need to ask yourself if you can afford to miss out on all the above opportunities for your work and for your life?

2. XML sitemap generator for WordPress. A XML sitemap helps the search engines do a better job of crawling and indexing your blog content. It’s like a GPS system for the search engine spiders. This plugin also alerts all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing that you’ve published new content to your website.

3. SEO Smart Links. You may not know inter-linking your blog posts and pages is an important aspect of SEO.   It’s not just about the links coming into your site from other websites. SEO smart links allows you to automatically add anchor text links to the keywords you want and links to a targeted URL you choose .

4. Robots Meta. You only want the search engines to view and index unique content on your blog right?  In fact, there are certain pages on your website with no SEO value right? Think about your “contact us page” or your “privacy page.”  This plugins lets you tell Google and the other search engines which pages to crawl and index.

5. Google Analytics for WordPress. You might ask yourself why include the Google analytics plugin with SEO?  The thing you must keep in mind is SEO is all about results.  You need to be constantly testing and tweaking your SEO strategies. If you don’t know your numbers, how can you test and tweak? Google Analytics easily tracks your blog’s stats including traffic, the keywords typed to find your page and referring sites.

6. Redirection. This is a WordPress plugin used to manage your 301 redirections, keeps a list of 404 errors, and generally cleans up any loose ends your website has. This plugin is a life saver if you’re bringing pages over from an old website or changing the directory of your WordPress installation

7. SEO Friendly Images. Google is not able to read images, animation or video. If you have a ton of images on your site without the proper ALT and TITLE tags. SEO Friendly images will add them automatically based on your settings.

We look forward to hearing you comments to hear what you have to say about it.

Although it is difficult to please everyone we seem to be getting on okay. It’s nice to hear good positive reports back. It motivates us for the next customer.

I would like to ask you, what are you looking for from a web company? What are your views on web companies in Northern Ireland? Would you ever consider moving?