There is a veritable “anti-Facebook movement” these days as more and more people express their discontent with the world’s largest social network.
Benefits of Using Facebook for Business
Facebook is said to be “dying” by the news feed algorithm, and it is getting harder and harder for users to increase their likes and deepen the engagement of friends and followers. Some “experts” even advise forgetting about the Facebook business page.
With the last piece of advice, we will strongly disagree. Figures and facts don’t lie. Facebook is visited monthly by 160,000,000 companies and 2,890,000,000 users.
What does it mean? That there is nothing easier than being on Facebook. However, what exactly are the benefits of having a business page there? Below you will find our answer, as well as irrefutable proof that your business should be on this social network.
How can Facebook benefit?
- Reach billions of potential customers
- Turn fans into a mailing list
- Reduce your ad spend
- Target specific audiences
- Get traffic analytics
- Increase brand loyalty
- Increase your website traffic
- Improve SEO metrics
9 Reach Smartphone Users
- Track Your Competitors
- Connect Your Favorite Business Applications
- Host Paid Events and Earn Income
Wait, is Facebook suitable for B2B companies?
Conclusion
How can Facebook benefit?
Facebook is nothing more than a tool: it’s all about how you use it.
To get the most out of this social network, you need to decide how you present your business on this platform.
Are you looking to build brand awareness?
Publish new posts regularly, know when your audience is online, run brand awareness campaigns, and promote your successful posts to reach a wider audience.
Do you want your product or service to sell better?
Launch paid ads, optimize them, customize your creatives, and create landing pages.
Want to generate leads?
Collect email addresses, create (or join) Facebook groups and add people you can help as friends.
The possibilities of Facebook are endless. But first, you must understand your goals.
Consider this: You can’t expect great results from just posting content. Facebook is designed to meet specific business goals.
Of course, a company with over 500,000 subscribers can effortlessly promote its product and sell it instantly. But in case you are the owner of a small or even medium-sized business, you need to define your business program, as well as: clearly
- find and exhaust a variety of strategies;
- modify and test your marketing proposals;
- improve your marketing messages ( copywriting for your brand ).
Trust us: it’s only by considering the current reality that you can make the best use of all 12 benefits of Facebook for your business.
Reach billions of potential customers
2.89 billion – okay, let’s round that up to (almost) 3 billion users.
Do I need to say anything else? This is the number of people on Earth who log into Facebook at least once a month.
2 billion is the number of Facebook’s Daily Active Users (DAU).
If this is not a wide enough pool of potential clients for your business, you should rethink your business or rethink your thinking.
Here are some more mind-boggling statistics about Facebook’s incredible reach:
- 3 billion monthly active users (8% growth annually);
- 2 billion daily active users (an increase of 9% annually);
- 3 billion families who are active daily users (an increase of 11% annually);
- The fastest-growing Facebook group is people aged 65 and over;
- only 10% of users live in the US or Canada;
- 75% of US users are high-income people who spend 1.5 hours daily on this social network.
Convert fans to a mailing list
It is not enough to draw people’s attention to your page to provide a business with a long-term and sustainable path to success.
Of course, the popularity of the Facebook business account increases brand awareness, provides social value, and gives access to the company through social media, which builds trust with buyers.
But what happens if Facebook disappears one day? What happens if business opportunities on the platform are drastically reduced? Or what will happen if the social network increases the cost of advertising?
If any of the above happens and you do not save your subscribers’ contacts, your business can have huge problems.
This is why sane companies collect email addresses from their Facebook followers so businesses can interact with their customers outside of social media.
Collecting email addresses is effective because you can attract your fans from a different marketing channel. Many companies use newsletters, prize-winning contests, and irresistibly attractive gifts to do this.
Therefore, you should develop an email marketing system that includes options such as:
- automation of growing leads ;
- tracking your performance;
- segmentation of subscribers;
- A / B testing of emails, their headers, and templates;
- testing various proposals and calls to action;
- variety of subject lines for your emails (educational, product-related, testimonials, etc.).
By converting your followers into recipients, you take control of your audience.
Cut your ad costs
Opening a business page on Facebook will cost you a whopping $ 0. Sure, you can pay a trendy graphic artist to create an avatar and cover, but stock photos work just fine as practice shows.
Our thought is as follows.
However, even if you run paid ads, marketers estimate that it will cost a lot less on Facebook than on other platforms (like Google), not to mention offline marketing.
Facebook ads are still relatively inexpensive compared to traditional print, radio, or TV ads, and you can target your target audience 1,000 times more accurately.
You can target the following key parameters:
- interests,
- age,
- behaviour,
- device used,
- employment,
- marital status,
- location,
- similar audiences (lookalike audiences).
There are countless examples of companies using Facebook Like Ads and other types of advertising to achieve their business goals.
A great example is the Pura Vida page:
This homemade jewellery company posted promotional photos of its products on Facebook to attract new customers and increase sales, targeting similar audiences. (And by the way, Lookalike Audiences are people with characteristics identical to the custom audience that you share with Facebook.)
Pura Vida had a simple goal of increasing sales during the holidays, but the company has achieved much more:
- the return on investment in advertising has grown 2.8 times;
- sales have doubled compared to the previous sales record;
- the average order value increased by 28% from a year earlier.
Target a specific audience
We hinted at this in the previous paragraph.
In any case, you hardly want them all to like your page: you want people who are genuinely interested in your offer. So what do you do? Target your ads to specific people!
We recommend setting up the display of your ads to target customers living within a radius of 15-25 km. Facebook calls this radius targeting.
Such advertising may cost you a little more, but it will laser-accurately target the acquisition of “likes” from potential customers.
Not to mention that you can take advantage of the “local celebrity” effect when people in that radius start recognizing your business from Facebook ads.
If we compare TV ads to Facebook ads, then in the first case, it will be difficult for you to understand whether the on-air impressions are being targeted to the viewers you want. TV ads tend to be more like a brand awareness marketing campaign.
What does Facebook offer? You can set up comprehensive coverage or spot targeting of your market as you need. By the way, you can even target your Facebook posts (we mean free posts that meet the definition of organic reach).
Get traffic analytics
Facebook provides excellent statistics for business owners, and they are easy to understand even for people with no technical background.
Just take a quick look at the information from the Statistics section. There you can see exciting data:
- Page Views
- “Coverage” is a valuable indicator, isn’t it ?;
- “Actions on the page”;
- “Likes”;
- and much more.
(The most successful posts should be those you promote to more people because these posts have already been proven to get the most attention.)
Compare this to placing an ad in a local newspaper: Do you have similar statistics on how many people bought your ad after seeing your ad in print media? Can you track the views of your ad in the newspaper? No way.
Build brand loyalty
A Facebook business page can work wonders in helping you build brand loyalty. If your followers see that you are active on social media and respond quickly to questions,
Consider this example taken from the Airbnb Facebook page.
Airbnb uses UGC (user-generated content – UGC)for his belt filling, which they receive from happy customers. This allows the company to showcase unique exotic locations that its business page subscribers can fall in love with you.
And the bottom line: Because Facebook’s algorithm “loves” visual content (versus simple links), Airbnb’s strategy has dramatically increased the organic reach of its posts.
Additionally, the brand uses every Facebook campaign as an opportunity to engage with customers. Airbnb pays special attention to service, learns about the wants and needs of its fans, asks them questions, as a result of which posts on the company’s business page always attract a lot of attention. In this way, Facebook can provide your business with brand loyalty to retain customers for you in the long run.
Increase traffic to your site
If your only business is to draw attention to your publications, you are not achieving many business goals. Smart account owners use Facebook pages to drive traffic to their websites and landing pages.
The great thing about posting with links is that Facebook generates a nice big, attractive image if it is available on your site, and such large, well-visible images are clicked a lot and willingly:
Linking to your website is an essential part of any Facebook content marketing strategy. The number of “likes,,” comments and reposts of such posts is lower, but this is entirely normal because their main goal is to increase traffic and not draw attention to the page on Facebook.
Improve SEO Metrics
The topic of SEO and Facebook is being discussed quite actively.
Some marketers claim that information from the “About” section of Facebook business pages is retrieved and thus searchable on Google.
This statement is difficult to confirm or deny. A test was carried out: they launched a Google search for various keywords, but there were no results related to the service page on Facebook. At the same time, many companies believe that the more search paths available to customers, the better for the business.
Reach smartphone users
Here’s the thing: The vast majority of Facebook users access the platform through their mobile devices (98.5%). Moreover, many of them access the social network only through their smartphones.
Since this measure does not plan to decrease, the presence on Facebook is becoming more critical for your business. The advantage is that the platform does all the hard work for you on its own. It will automatically optimize your page for desktop and mobile.
W they see:
- opening hours,
- address;
- reviews;
You do not want customers to hang around the bush, trying to figure out one thing – how to contact you?
Keep track of your competitors.
But they can also help make your business better. An interesting feature on Facebook pages allows companies to spy on their competitors.
This does not mean that you can see their sales figures or the results of their advertising campaign. But it’s a great way to see other businesses in your industry and niche market develop on Facebook.
Go to the statistics overview on your page and then scroll down to the Pages of Interest section. Add a few competitor pages or use the page recommendations that the social network itself will suggest to you based on the competition in your region or industry, and you will see something like this:
Select pages by clicking “Follow Page,” or search for pages by clicking on the “Add Pages” button, and then compare the performance of your page with the competition.
This section is also great for getting ideas for publishing. You can visit it to see why. And if specific actions caused the massive success of the post, you can try to repeat them on your page.
Finally, if you’re using paid marketing, then check the Facebook Ads Library to see what types of ads work best in your industry. This is especially beneficial for B2C companies such as eCommerce businesses.
Connect your favorite business applications
Facebook introduced several cool features that allow businesses to connect apps directly to the platform to make life easier for their customers.
You can use apps to:
- scheduling meetings,
- booking,
- eCommerce.
For example, if you’re a restaurant owner, a table reservation app is a great way to attract new customers who find your page through Google searches or Facebook ads.
All of these applications allow your business to simplify the buying process for your customers.
Host paid events and get Income.
Facebook allows paid exclusive live streams on your business page. This is not a bad idea if you deliver live training in high demand and you have a sizable audience on Facebook.
Facebook has a Partner Monetization Policy that you must follow if you want to use this service (after all, you are using their platform).
It all depends on your marketing goal and your ability to resonate with B2B decision-makers.
If you’re advertising on Facebook, target by occupation, industry, and write ad copy that resonates with your ideal customers.
We mean this: maybe some CEO just logged into Facebook to see the latest memes, but your ad might still interest him! it comes to B2B marketing on Facebook:
- Make a plan and post educational content (blog posts, infographics, case studies) around it.
- Add the Facebook pixel to your site. This will help you retarget potential visitors from B2B industries through advertising.
- Create a group for B2B professionals in your industry (and offer them advertisements from time to time).
- Add opening hours and company information to your Facebook business page.
- Add an action button so the customer can book an appointment for your call back.
- “Conversion” goal, then use the ad group scheduling feature to show ads during peak hours.
- Upload your customer spreadsheet and create a similar audience. Then run ads targeting 1-2% of the people most similar to your customers.
- Let’s say you’re getting great results from your Facebook ad campaign – keep this audience customized.
Conclusion
We hope that the 12 benefits and best practices described above have helped you understand that it is easy to set up your own Facebook business page.
There are few marketers capable of running a business without a Facebook page. We hope we were able to motivate those who already have them to improve their business pages.