When I wake up in the morning, I first think, “What can I do to build deeper relationships with the customers I have?” And second, “What can I do to build relationships with new customers?” There are many ways to do this, such as being nice, speaking at events, nurturing referrals, and so much more. Many of the old ways of building relationships still work, but compared to digital communication, those ways are often slow and hard to measure.

Digital communication (blogs, websites, e-mail newsletters, online advertising, and so on) enables you to reach new and current customers faster — to track their responses to your communications, to enable them to forward your message to others — all with a few clicks of the mouse.

With the advent of social media, digital communication capabilities have grown exponentially. Not only can businesses communicate directly with their audiences, but audiences can more easily communicate with businesses, and audiences (customers and potential customers) can communicate with each other about businesses, brands, products, services, or marketplaces.

When small business owners look for new customers, the Internet is the best option — it’s better than print, TV, radio, Yellow Pages, billboards, and so on. The Internet provides a variety of ad options small businesses can consider, such as search engine advertisements, banner advertisements, mobile advertisements, and social media. But if I had to pick one place for advertising online, it would be Facebook. It has the broadest range of options. Facebook is perfect for small businesses on a low budget that are just testing the waters or businesses with a much larger budget and more experience. Facebook allows you to reach a broad audience or be very selective and target a specific audience, making it an effective way to reach potential customers and beyond.

With approximately 1 billion profiles, Facebook has just about everyone. If you’re looking for a business customer, a retired uncle, a military veteran, a stay-at-home mom, a high school teacher, or your “average” consumer, you’ll find them all on Facebook.

As you’ll see in this book, Facebook gives you a variety of free tools to engage with your audience (through great content — posts, photos, video, and more), interact with customers (Check-in Deals), voting, interactive apps, advertising, and so much more.

This book will help you strategically use Facebook as a powerful communications tool. Maybe you just want to start by posting a relevant message or two. Maybe you want to get fancy and include a video and photo. How about taking the training wheels off and building a better Facebook Page for your business, product, or service? What about customizing this Page with some cool and useful apps? Getting comfortable? It might be time to purchase advertising on Facebook and drive local traffic to your local retail store.

This book also covers creating Facebook events, driving traffic to your website through Facebook, and catching media attention. And I think one of the best parts of the book is the real-world examples from successful small businesses.

John Wanamaker, a famous advertising executive, once said, “I know half my advertising is wasted; I’m just not sure which half.” Using Facebook is much better than print advertising to precisely reach the right customers, measure your return on investment and their engagement with your product or service, and ultimately, make a sale.

You’re working with customers, hiring employees, and doing so many other things to manage your business day to day while still looking toward the future. Although customer acquisition and development are not easy, using Facebook can make it a lot easier.