What Facebook Can Do for Your Business
What started as a means of communication for college students to keep in touch with their friends from home has quickly grown into the biggest, most popular social networking website to conquer the Internet.
Other than taking quizzes, finding your high school friends, and playing games with its many applications, Facebook can bring big things to the table for businesses.
Who you can reach on Facebook
Just to give you a sense of how many people are on Facebook and how many people you have the possibility of reaching when you start making your business connections through Facebook, there are over 120 million regular users who log on to Facebook at least once a day. Over 30 million users not only access Facebook from their home or office computer but access the website through their mobile telephone as well.
Over 300,000 businesses have pages on Facebook and of those 300,000 businesses, over 100,000 are small businesses.
Getting started using Facebook for your business
You get started by logging on to www.facebook.com and signing up for an account. You will create a business account as opposed to a personal account. A business account is designed for people who want to use the site exclusively to administer Pages and their advertising campaign. Because of the nature of the account, the functionality is different than a personal account.
People with business accounts are not able to view profiles of others and they cannot view content that doesn’t live on the Pages that they administer. Business accounts can be found in a search. If you have both personal and business Facebook accounts, from your business Facebook page, you can ask your personal Facebook friends to become fans (the business equivalent of a friend) of your business page and you can send them updates. In addition to that, you can invite people to become your fans by sending them a message to their email address.
Make sure that you use your business name, or the closest that you can come to it so that when your clients search for you, they will be able to easily find you. Now let’s look at ways that you can use Facebook to help promote your business.
On your Facebook business page, you can add your company logo, a link to your website, and write or post your company profile.
Share articles and flyers
You can publish your company news and PR by linking your blog and website articles to your Facebook business page. You can also share flyers and other promotional materials, such as coupons that advertise your business, through the photos and/or links on your Facebook business page.
Get the word out about special promotions and events
Using your Facebook page, you can tell your existing clients, as well as Facebook friends who aren’t clients yet, about special events and promotions that your company is running. You can also offer a special “Facebook only” promotion that will not only promote your business but your Facebook page as well.
Advertising your business on Facebook
No. 1 most useful way to use Facebook for your business is to advertise through it. As millions of users log on to Facebook several times each day, you have the power to get your name out to those users repeatedly.
Facebook offers several different advertising options for businesses looking to advertise on Facebook. One option is a pay-per-click option, similar to Google, where you pay for every time someone clicks your ad. Another option is to pay for the number of times your ad is presented.
One of the major benefits of advertising on Facebook is that the ads are generated to each user based on word association of something the user has on their Facebook page. For example, if a user recently posted on their Facebook page that they got engaged and your business sells wedding gowns, Facebook generates the most relevant ads to the person to pop up on the user’s page. So your ad would show up on the page instantly as they use Facebook.
Join networking groups on Facebook
Just like networking groups in real life, one of the easiest ways to spread the word about your business is to network. On Facebook, you can join “groups,” which allow you to network with other Facebook users. Some groups are simply for users while others are more business oriented. Search for the groups that you want to join and encourage discussion about your business on the wall of that group.
Summary
Once you have tried all of the advertising techniques above, you can’t just sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. The truth is that there is always more that you can be doing on Facebook to enhance your business’ presence on the world’s largest social networking site.
On a daily basis, you should be updating your status so that your presence is constant on your friends’ pages. With constant presence, your friends’ friends will begin to notice you and soon, they will be the ones requesting you instead of vice versa.
To see an example of a Facebook business page, you can visit CompuKol Communications on Facebook and become our fan.
