What is Facebook good for?

Catching up with friends, old and new? Oohing-and-aahing over photos of their [babies/puppies/drunken exploits – insert as appropriate, depending on the friend concerned]?

How about building a business?

With over 250 million active users on Facebook, it’s not only a given that your potential customers are online, but also highly likely that they’re a member of this social networking site.

And, in the same way that Facebook makes it easy for you to connect with your friends, you can use the site to connect with customers.

You do this by creating a Facebook page for your business

A Facebook page is similar in many respects to a personal profile. However, a page has been designed specifically to give brands of various kinds – businesses, charities, bands, celebrities, politicians – a presence on Facebook.

A Facebook presence can help your business succeed

1. It allows you to engage with your community of customers

In Facebook parlance, each person that joins your page is a fan. Yes, you too can be a rock star – of your niche, that is!

But unlike some aloof rock stars, you can use your Facebook page to interact directly with your fans, build a strong community and receive feedback on your products or services. The way in which pages are set up promotes this – you and your fans can do things like post to your wall or the discussion board, you can upload pictures or videos, or invite fans to events.

Every time you update your page in one these ways, your fans receive notification of this in their Facebook news feeds. Think of a Facebook page as another way to engage with people who have shown an interest in your business, like an alternative to an email list or list of subscribers to your blog.

An advantage of building a popuar Facebook page over email lists and blog subscribers, however, is the fact that Facebook provides you with aggregated demographic information related to your fans, given that this information is in their database already. This doesn’t mean that you have access to the private details of all your fans, just that Facebook will tell you things like what percentage of your fans are male or female, what age ranges they fall into and where they’re located. This is information that can be used to understand your fans and to target product or service offerings accordingly.

As an extension of this, Facebook has also recently introduced the ability to target fans based on their birthdays. This means so much more than just wishing fans a happy birthday – you could send them a gift from your business, such as a voucher that they can redeem on your website, for example.

2. It builds your brand

As with personal user profiles, Facebook pages make use of a tabbed structure. These tabs are highly customisable, which means that you can use HTML together with Facebook’s own markup language (FBML) to create distinctive content that matches your brand identity.

A good use of this feature is the ability to create custom landing pages. Rather than having people new to your business land in the middle of a confusing wall of posts, you can use this feature to direct them to a customised welcome page that explains your business clearly.

Every time one of your fans takes action related to your page – joins your page in the first place, posts to your wall, adds to your discussion board – this shows up in their news feed and is visible to all their friends, who may in turn be tempted to visit you page and become a fan themselves. As a result, a Facebook page provides the potential for your brand to develop a large viral following.

While Facebook pages can be used to drive traffic back to your website, they also offer the possibility of engaging people directly. This is because Facebook’s pages also allow for integration of content that you would normally put on your website, such as newsletter sign-ups or ebook downloads. Used in conjunction with your business website, a Facebook page can therefore become a very profitable business tool.

3. It has benefits related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Pages profit from the high standing of Facebook itself on the Internet – Facebook’s high volume of traffic, plus its high ranking, means that the page that you create for your business will get indexed quickly by the search engines. This ensures that it is visible not only to users within Facebook, but to the rest of the world wide web too, thereby ensuring that your business is found easily by your customers.

Next steps

This post has detailed the why of setting up a Facebook page for your business. My next post will provide the how.

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And please visit our Facebook page – it’s newly set up and will be receiving more customisation over the coming few weeks to make it look a bit prettier, but if you’d like to get in at the beginning to be able to say you knew us when, become a fan of Phenomenoodle on Facebook today!