Small businesses, too, can use social media to their advantage.

The live-music business in a college town like Missoula, Mont., is not nearly as easy as it looks. Sure, there’s a ready pool of patrons for good music and drinking and dancing, but they don’t have much money, and there’s a lot of competition for the evening entertainment dollar. As a result, several mainstays of the Missoula local music scene have gone out of business in recent years.

The Badlander, a two-year-old bar and live music venue that occupies one of the better club spaces in downtown Missoula, seems destined to avoid that fate. Owned by four youthful partners, the club features multiple stages and a lot of clever ideas on how to bring people in the door. And one of its not-so-secret weapons is Facebook.

Colin Hickey, the booking agent and the man responsible for its Facebook strategy, says the Badlander has about 3,000 fans on Facebook. A companion venue that’s part of the same club, The Palace, has about 1,600.

The most obvious use of the Facebook page is to get the word out about upcoming shows. Hickey does one posting a day on Facebook about what’s happening that night, but he keeps a tight limit on formal “invitations.”

“We decided early on that we didn’t want to bombard people with event invitations,” says Hickey. “As Facebook users ourselves, we know that can be very annoying. We have about 20 shows a month, and you don’t want to send 20 invitations a month or people will start to hide from you.”

Instead, he relies on the basic “status update” for the daily post, and uses invitations just two or three times a month when a show needs an extra push—or when he’s trying to get a sense of how many people to expect.