Facebook has never really appealed to me that much.

I guess the main reason is that it doesn’t have much penetration back home where most of my friends are. So on a personal level I do have an active account and use it to keep in touch with some of my triathlon mates and people that I only see occasionally or have worked with in the past, but certainly I don’t consider myself a heavy user…

Nowhere near as much as other people I know anyway, including my girlfriend, who’s logged on from the time she wakes up till she goes to bed.

I think most people? use Facebook as a way of keeping in touch with their friend’s lives without having to bother to meet them face to face for a catch up. It has become people’s dose of daily ‘socialising’ so they can feel they are part of a bigger group and not feel ‘alone’.

On a more professional level, I’ve been doing a bit of work with my triathlon coach to help him increase website traffic and hopefully generate coaching leads.

Amongst other things, I started him on Facebook (he’s a bit of a gumby when it comes to computers) with a simple profile and also created a group for his athletes to join. Within the group we added a few key races that we know most people usually attend and let them invite others to join too.

Lastly, he’s automatically broadcasting new blog post via his status update. I know some people will say this isn’t good practice but in this case I think it is worthwhile as the updates are not so regular (weekly at best) so it is unlikely to annoy people.

So far the results have been really good and Analytics says 5% of the traffic coming through to the website is coming from Facebook.

At this stage and with limited time available, I am not sure how much more we can actually do to leverage this social network but if you have any other tips or good examples on how you use Facebook to connect with your audience, feel free to post away!