running your own Facebook Business Page
Is Facebook still what it used to be?
Some claim Facebook is dying a slow death because of new rules and regulations, including restrictions on the news feed and the drop in reach, even claiming Facebook is not good enough for your business page anymore.
Well, we don’t agree.
We are convinced that Facebook is still the best social network to have a presence as a business. To be there, or not to be there, is a no-brainer!
But, what are the benefits for you maintaining your Facebook business page?
Top 10 advantages of running your own Facebook Business Page
1. Bigger exposure to possible customers or clients:
Facebook has billions of users in total, but what is more important is that 2.23 billion are MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS. That is 2,230,000,000 people actively doing something on Facebook every month.
And it is growing.
By June 30, 2017, Facebook had 2.01 billion monthly active users. So, in a year this has grown by a massive 22 million active users per month!
If you are unable to find new customers for your business on Facebook, you might just as well go fishing, or take up golf.
2. Getting more leads:
As with fishing, just having a line and bait in the water with fish swimming around, is not good enough – that is like having people hitting the LIKE button – it is not enough to give you a long-term, sustainable business. You might be able to make some kind of living in the short term, but what if Mark Zuckerberg or one of his co-founders of the world’s most-used social platform hits the delete button one day?
If you are not connected with your Facebook followers outside of the platform, it might be time to go buy some fresh bait or get the golf balls out.
Smart businesses gather leads by means of phone numbers and email addresses so they can still contact you – Facebook or not. They do this in many ways – loyalty cards, competitions, lucky draws, newsletters etc – any wat they can get you to supply them with your contact details.
However, be careful how you use these leads.
Don’t spam your leads or drown them in emails pushing affiliate products or any other kind of junk, unless it is what you signed them up for. Send one or two emails per week offering useful information that that will lead them to your website where they might sign up and become customers or clients.
3. Decrease your Marketing Expenses:
To start a Business Page on Facebook costs, well, absolutely nothing!
You might use material that you have paid someone for, like a logo or a profile pic, but that is not an absolute necessity.
Normal photographs of your business will be just fine, and sometimes even better than some fancy creative material from an expensive graphic artist or designer.
It shouldn’t cost you anything out of your pocket to get your page going until you start buying advertising to collect page LIKEs, improving posts and running word-of-mouth recommendations called “sponsored stories”. These are all marketing tools you should use for your page.
The so-called “Facebook ads” are actually quite cheap compared to more formal print media, radio or TV advertising, and are thousands of times more targeted to your customer.
Recently we bought some Facebook ads and in the very first week received 1,200 LIKEs for the South African rand equivalent of only $24, which came to 2 US cents per LIKE!
After this the page started growing by an additional 600 LIKEs organically thanks to the engagement of the first 1,200 paid fans.
The question is if every page can collect new LIKEs for just 2 cents each?
Possible not every page, but by aiming your ads to targets interested in the topic of your page, it is a sure way to keep costs low.
4. Hit your target:
This is extremely important – just because Facebook has over 2 billion users, by no means will all of them want to LIKE your page.
As a matter of fact, you don’t want the crowd – just a small percentage of them would actually engage with your page.
As mentioned, we managed to get inexpensive LIKEs by targeting our ads. We only targeted Facebook users who already had an interest in our business, almost guaranteeing many of them would hit the LIKE button.
The same goes for your business page.
If you run a local business, like a plumber or electrician, aim your ads to Facebook targets in your area. These FB ads will cost a bit more, but the LIKEs and possible customers or clients are targeted as if through the sights of a sniper.
Running a very, VERY expensive ad on national TV in prime time, you have no way of knowing whether your ad targeted the right people for your business.
Facebook ads can make this a fact, provided you target the ad correctly.
5. Facebook Insights does it all for you
Numbers are not for everyone, but the new Facebook Insights provided on Facebook business pages does it all for you in an easy-to-understand manner – even for non-technical people. These insights also provide other great information for business owners.
Here is an example of our page:
- How many page LIKEs received
- How far and wide the posts reach (look at that Reach)
- Engagement of the page, performance and much more
Dig around and learn how specific posts are performing, where your fans are, etc.
Compare this to a formal printed ad in your local community paper – do they tell you how many people visited your store/website from the ad?
No! They can only tell you how many papers they printed and distributed.
6. Improve your brand’s loyalty
Your Facebook business page can move mountains building brand loyalty.
If you provide honest, valuable and entertaining content, your followers will remain loyal – even when you slip and fall. Nowadays people go online to find products they need and where they can get it, and they predominately search social media (especially Google).
If they see you are active and quick to respond, they will be more likely to do contact you than someone with who is not on Facebook or who has a poorly-run page that is not active at all.
We recently started a Facebook page for a small company, but already have brand loyalty above and beyond competitors in the area – people who have been running their businesses for years!
The reason? They don’t have active, up-to-date Facebook pages.
7. Increase Your Web Traffic
Facebook Business Page owners who are clever, use their pages to drive traffic to their websites.
If you're only on Facebook to get LIKEs, you simply have a presence – you are not a marketer.
Use link posts to drive traffic to your website.
Facebook now generates a full-width thumbnail image if your website has one available. They draw more attention, and these bigger images are clicked more frequently.
Posting links to your own website (don’t send traffic away from your site) is an indispensable portion of any Facebook content strategy.
We post links to blog posts 2-3 times per day and mix in some light-hearted content to get people talking. Our goal is to drive traffic with those posts, not necessarily get engagement on Facebook.
Our newsletter drives almost as much traffic, proving why you should gather email addresses.
The bottom line is simply this: Having a Facebook Business Page will increase your web traffic by a large margin as long as you use the right posting strategies.
8. Improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
search engine optimization
noun
COMPUTING
- the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
"the key to getting more traffic lies in integrating content with search engine optimization and social media marketing"
The topic of SEO together with Facebook is quite controversial. For some the About section of a business page is scraped and searchable by Google. However, it is difficult to accurately verify or deny this.
We’ve tried searching with different keywords for our page and do not always find the results related to our Facebook page. But when someone searches ???, our Facebook page shows up on page 1 of the Google search results.
The more ways your business can be found, the better!
9. Become Mobile
Most Facebook users access the site via their mobile phones, and many using their mobile device only.
This is a growing trend and it is therefore more and more important to have an active presence on Facebook. The magic about a Facebook page is that it works like an exoskeleton which does the heavy lifting for you, adapting your page for mobile devices as well as desktop or laptop computers.
The exception is the custom tab that is seen on desktop devices but not mobile devices (unless you supply a mobile-friendly link created by an app provider (take a look at this one by ShortStack).
When visitors view your Facebook Business Page on their mobile, it shows:
- Hours of operation
- Address
- Reviews
- Phone number to call directly from the Facebook mobile app
10. Know what the competition does!
An interesting new feature on Facebook pages lets businesses spy on competitors.
This doesn't mean you can see their sales or results from their ads, but helps to see how others in your area and your niche are growing on Facebook.
Facebook makes suggestions based on competition in your area in the same (or similar) niche.
If you look at the Pages to Watch and see a page has exploded and gained lots of new LIKEs, you can visit them to see what they have done right. A post might have had a huge success and you can copy what they are doing.
This won’t give you a lot of true insight, but might give you just a little motivation to break bad habits on Facebook and improve your posting and advertising.
Hopefully this list of benefits has convinced you that a Facebook Business Page is an absolute must. We can't imagine running a business and NOT having a Facebook Business Page.
For those who already have pages, we hope this has motivated you to improve your page and post better content!
To learn more about Facebook make sure you join us for our next Facebook Webinar
