Benefits of Using Facebook For Business

Founded in 2004, Facebook is arguably one of the most important social media platforms in today’s industry. With a staggering 1.59 billion monthly users (Dec 31. 2015 via Wikipedia) every company should be using Facebook for business regardless of their size.

This site has grown and developed remarkably over the past decade now including sponsored posts, Facebook advertising, business reviews and much more to benefit companies and improve their social media presence.

Still not convinced that this is the right avenue for your business? Here’s a list of benefits which you can expect to see when using Facebook for business. We’re sure that once you’ve read this post, you’ll be creating a Facebook account in no time.

Remember when we said that Facebook has over 1.59 billion monthly users? Imagine how many of those users could be potential customers. Having only a business website is simply not enough any more, people spend hours of their day browsing through Facebook looking for something to interest them, so create a Facebook for business tactics and you’ll be seeing your client list grow from strength to strength.

Facebook is a free social media platform, that’s right, it cost absolutely nothing to create an account, whether that is a personal profile or a business profile. There are additional extras which you can pay for to enhance your business profile which we’ll discuss in the next point however to set up a profile you will not be needing any money, just a little bit of time.

When setting up your business profile be sure to include a suitable profile photo such as your company logo and a cover photo such as the business location or your company slogan.

Facebook Advertising is a paid add on for Facebook where you can create boosted posts, suggested apps, pages or posts and sponsored adverts for your business. With Facebook Advertising you can set your budget, create the ads and track your results.

Using Facebook Advertising is a fairly inexpensive way to target potential customers and when we say target, we mean target! You can target your customers by location, demographics, interests, behaviours and connections

With a business page you can access the insights to your page. What are insights we hear you ask? They let you know how people are interacting with your page. Through insights you can see your page likes, actions taken, people reached and how well each post has performed.

Using insights is a great tool to use to tailor your Facebook marketing campaign, by seeing which posts your customers engage with you can then adjust your campaign to create more posts similar to successful ones.

Apart from conversions, what businesses want most from their customers is brand loyalty, knowing that a customer will return to your business and buy from you again and using Facebook for business is a fantastic tool for enabling this.

By posting regularly on Facebook, customers will see your brand personality shine and be intrigued. With more and more customers using Facebook to primarily search for businesses and services, when they see that a business is regularly active on their Facebook account then they will be more drawn to choose them over other, less active companies on the platform.

Customer engagement is invaluable to any marketing campaign. Whether you are advertising a product or a service, receiving customer feedback is always valued but often hard to get hold of with traditional forms of advertising platforms. Whereas when using Facebook for business, customers are free to comment, like, share, react, review or even private message a company.

Breaking down the walls between businesses and customers allows you to build a relationship with your clientèle. You are able to answer customer queries, ask them questions in posts and see how they react to what you’ve shared.

Have customers like your Facebook page doesn’t necessarily lead directly to conversions, unfortunately, but there are other ways to encourage your customers to buy from you and that is by making a connection. Different to customer engagement or a brand relationship, a connection relates to actually getting customer information so that if, heaven forbid, Facebook broke then you have leads to follow up on.

Ways to gain customer leads include creating customer competitions such as ‘Win a Double Bed by Signing up to Our Newsletter’. Using competitions, give-aways and sign ups give the customer the chance to opt into being contacted via email and give you a new customer base to contact them on.

As a business, you should be aiming to post 2-3 times a week linking to your site. Sharing links on Facebook is a great way to drive traffic to your site however many companies can get this tactic wrong. The aim of your Facebook profile is to share relevant and interesting content and to avoid being too salesy so only posting links to your site will leave you with a very low customer engagement.

Try posting a couple of links to your site each week alongside posts to news stories, funny images, photos and content. This will show your customers that you are more focused on engaging that simply making money out of them.

Making your website mobile friendly can take quite a lot of hard work and will not happen overnight but with the majority of us using our mobile devices to search the web, what can you do to improve your mobile visibility? Use Facebook of course, Facebook is not only a desktop site, but also an app and the app is designed to be mobile friendly. When customers look at your Facebook page, they will be able to read your company information, posts and shares in a mobile friendly format.

Through your Facebook Insights, you have the ability to watch pages which are similar to yours. The Pages to Watch section allows you to select similar companies to yours and see their page likes, improvement on the previous week, how many times they’ve posted in the week and what their customer engagement was. Being able to compare your business to those similar to yours allows you to improve your marketing campaign and see what you’re competition are and aren’t doing right.

If you are not currently using social media within your marketing campaign and would like to know more information about the benefits of each social media platform then don’t hesitate to Contact Zelst directly where we will be more than willing to help you to come up with a successful social media strategy for your business.