Republished with permission of Comms Dealer
First published in Comms Dealer Nov 2014, p.41
Facebook can often be regarded as a trivial task that can be done at any time, but there are quite a few reasons why having a presence on Facebook should be taken seriously.
Seeing as Facebook is a platform where everyone shares likes and their interests, you can do the same through your business page. Sharing news, photos and videos will help build relationships, either with potential customers or partners and help showcase your business personality. If the content put across is engaging, these relationships become a source of value and loyalty.
Generating awareness for your brand is the main catalyst for word of mouth. The ones interacting with your content will subsequently publish it on all their friend’s feeds. Simply put, that means every interaction is amplified by each user, hundreds, if not thousands of times and can be noticed by their friends and followers.
This type of interaction native to Facebook is also very likely to happen post-purchase. Users often review the products or services they have just used. Positive feedback is thus shared with all your followers and there is no doubt surrounding the authenticity of these reviews – it’s honest, direct feedback that is very persuasive for other potential customers and it also showcases how your business is conducted to your partners.
Whilst exposure might be the biggest benefit, Facebook is also a very powerful promotion and marketing tool. With carefully curated content and a strong strategy, a Facebook Ad campaign can result in achieving multiple business objectives at once.
Facebook translates just as well to the B2B sector, seeing as all the business decision makers are human after all. It can also be a clever way of bypassing the corporate red tape and barrage of receptionists, connecting you directly with decision makers. Your targeted entrants might be more niche than generic B2C entrants, but usually, 1 targeted entrant accounts to at least 100 generic ones. This is because many B2C companies need thousands to make a promotion worthwhile, whether you might need just 1 to make a big sale.
Facebook offers great insight into your business through comprehensive analytics. You can see how your content is performing, what customers want, what they prefer, need or desire, as well as monitoring traffic to your website.
The next article in this series will focus on Twitter as a powerful tool for business.
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