Benefits of Independent Companies Using Facebook
Gather More Leads
Just having people Like your page isn’t enough to provide yourself with a long-term, sustainable business. Sure you can make a good living short-term off just using your Facebook page.
That’s why smart businesses gather leads in the form of email addresses — so they can contact their community outside of Facebook. Most do this through contests, giveaways & newsletters — and it’s a proven system.
Lower Your Marketing Expenses
Starting a Facebook business page costs you exactly $0.
Sure, you may pay a graphic artist to design a profile picture & cover photo — but that’s not a necessity. Simply using photographs you take of your business will work — and in some cases that’s better than a creative image from a designer.
My point is that getting rolling with a page costs you nothing until you start paying for ads to get page Likes, boosting posts & running Sponsored Stories — all of which you should be doing with your page. Facebook ads are relatively inexpensive when compared to traditional print, radio or TV ads — and are 1,000x more targeted.
Reach a Targeted Audience
Just because there are 1.19 billion Facebook users, it doesn’t mean they all want to Like your page. In fact, I wouldn’t want all of them to Like my page — because only a small percentage of them would actually engage with my posts. Targeting people who already had an interest in your page & business.
If you’re a local business, direct your ads to target customers within a 10-15 mile radius. The ads might cost you more, but the Likes & potential customers are laser targeted.
Be Mobile Ready
The vast majority of Facebook users are accessing the site via their mobile devices — many of them only with a mobile device. As this trend grows — it becomes more & more important for your business to have a presence on Facebook. The great thing about a Facebook page is Facebook does the heavy lifting for you! — optimizing your page for both desktop & mobile devices.
When people view your Facebook page on a mobile device it shows users:
- Hours of operation
- Address
- Reviews
- Phone number to call directly from the Facebook mobile app
Here is a screenshot from my iPhone 5 showing the business page for a graphic designer — Graphically Yours
Are you convinced?
Facebook is so important for business's to use! It's also so easy. Nowadays almost everyone is on Facebook and uses it, it's an amazing tool for small local businesses as well.
ReplyDeleteI think Facebook is one of the most important social medias, however it was noted in Julia's blog that generations are slowly dwindling off of Facebook. Regardless, I think being able to target your market through Facebook advertising and online advertising in general really is the way to go. Setting up the accounts are free, and you can do even a small week budget to get you going, and although $25-50 weekly will get you further on targeting, even $10 will make a difference. Businesses and especially smaller businesses just starting out would benefit so much from it, but I think most are scared to put in the money to get the return out of it. $40 a month for online advertising can go so far and using Facebook to specifically target is such a major marketing tool.
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