Facebook is a social networking site with millions of members worldwide and more joining every day. An opportunity to reach out to even a fraction of them would give businesses the perfect opportunity to sell their products. Its reach today extends beyond personal networking to business related relationship building. It offers advantages beyond the cost angle since Facebook membership is free and open to everyone to start pages, have a fan club, form groups and so on.
Why businesses need a Facebook page can hardly be stressed enough, since track records of businesses establish the role of Facebook and an increasing number of members look for Facebook pages of the business that the product they are buying belongs to. Some reasons explaining the rationale behind businesses needing a Facebook page include:
- Similar to a website but visible to more members- A Facebook page is similar to having a website but far more effective since it is visible to Facebook members logging in. Customers are unlikely to visit the business website every day, but will see the Facebook page each time they log in.
- Customers connect- Businesses having a Facebook page will soon have their customers connecting and sharing the page through the “like” button with their friends. This proves to be the best advertisement for the business whose page circulates in their groups and connections.
- Ideal way to share all business related information- A Facebook page is the ideal public page where all the latest news and information can be posted. Content shared on the page reaches customers and prospects immediately and they see it as soon as they log in.
- Increases search engine visibility- Search engines love pages that have regular and frequent updates and give them higher rankings. This perhaps explains the reason why Google loves Facebook.
- A viral marketing tool- Businesses can share valuable content through their Facebook pages which will appear on their fans’ news feed and those who find it interesting will pass it on and share by ‘liking’ it, which will place this link on each of their friends’ news feeds. This leads to a viral effect and within minutes the content has spread across borders to thousands of people.
- For customer surveys- Businesses can use the ‘Questions’ tool to ask their fans anything and use it for surveys by posting questions and getting candid replies. Customers love to feel that their opinion matters and this makes them more loyal.
- Event promotion- Facebook allows its members including businesses to create an event and ask people who will be attending it-this helps to gather a much larger presence for an exhibition or sale than would otherwise be humanly possible.
The list of benefits of Facebook is long but businesses need to know that Facebook is the second most visited internet site has over 500 million active users, and half of them log in at least once a day. This makes the chances of the business becoming highly conspicuous very high, and success with customers will logically follow.
