If you are a business owner and until now have not taken it upon yourself to set up a page for your company on Facebook, my advice to you is: get on it, pronto. With over 300 million active users around the globe, Facebook is a dream come true for advertisers and marketers. Keeping this number in mind, and the fact that these 300 million active users spend an estimated 700 billion minutes monthly surfing this platform makes by far the most popular and effective social media tool in reaching out to potential clients in the virtual world.
Setting up a Facebook page for your business is crucial for a number of reasons which I’ll explain in this blog, the first being the ability to target a wide audience of people in the sphere of social media. By having a page which is open to the general public, you are guaranteed surplus traffic being directed to your website, provided that you have done a good job linking content from your site to your page and vice-versa. Given that most reputable businesses have Facebook pages of their own, cross-linking to industry players and asking them to do the same is also an effective means of boosting your overall traffic.
Facebook apps are also a cool tool which you can place on your page that can increase your interaction with potential clients and show them that your company is more interactive than a piece of driftwood. The option to easily include RSS feeds, Twitter updates, event photos, and YouTube videos next to more professional stuff like press releases puts a face – or many faces – to your company name. As you’ve learned from our article about Google’s Video Hangouts, a picture is worth a thousand words!
Finally, advertising on Facebook is just as easy as setting up a page for your business, and those 300 million active users are a juicy crowd which you’d be wise to tune into. Facebook ads give you the option of tailoring your online presence to very specific target groups so that the impact of your campaign is focused where it needs to be; customization includes age group, gender, education, relationship status, workplace, and geographic regions. Facebook ads not only ensure that your intended audience is targeted, but the tool also allows you to control your spending on ad campaigns, with the option of stopping a campaign at a minute’s notice if you feel that it is unsuccessful.
