Facebook offers the following for businesses:
Pages; Create a space to interact with your fans, get to know potential customers and build a community.
Ads; Reach exactly the people you want with ads that let you target by age, location, interests and more.
Sponsored Stories; Take advantage of friends talking to friends with sponsored stories, a natural way to amplify word of mouth.
Platform; Transform your website into a social experience with plug-ins and custom apps.
A quick tour of Facebook and you can find most companies on there, pushing their brand or competition, acting as a point of contact and trying to gain more fans.
The dream is that the Facebook page will be a valuable marketing tool, driving people to buy the product. But, this dream rarely turns into a reality, with most cases ending in a costly bill as companies shell out for media managers!
The argument for using Facebook is usually, “because everyone else is” and “because we want to offer a resources page to target new demographics.
This sound strategically sound, but if you have been pushing Grandma juice for 100 years, will appealing to the 16-30yr olds really help sell your product? Before rolling out a fan page be aware of what you are offering and how you are selling yourself.
Fan pages can offer extra value, a business can upload videos, vouchers and offers that, unless you like the page, you won’t get anywhere else. A fan page needs to continuously grow, adapting to Facebook and its changes. Creating a page may be easy but it takes dedication and time for its upkeep.
Paying for adverts and sponsorship can boost your fan pages profile, but make sure it is worth it. Some businesses spend thousands on increasing their fan base, putting their effort into offering value over product pushes, but receive no sales conversion.
You may be thinking, well we have thousands of fans and our sales are great, but do you think about the bigger picture – how are you marketing yourselves elsewhere? TV, Twitter, POS, blog.
Having a blog is one of the most important parts of social media, it can boost Google listings, give your company a presence in the industry and can be interacted with.
So think about Facebook and whether it really is working for your business, don’t just go to the party for the sake of it, your business is about making money – ensure all of your marketing is doing that for you.