With such an immense and international community on Facebook, it is a superb platform to help grow your business, and build up closer relationships with your customers. According to the Facebook Press room in May 2011, there are more than 500 million active users on Facebook, who spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
But are you going around it the right way?
When we sign up to Facebook, we sign up as an individual and get a personal account - we have personal details such as a name, gender and date of birth. These accounts have been created for personal use - just think about what you're asked to provide and how it would relate if you wanted an account for your business: does your business have a gender? From the initial sign up screen, it's clear to see that this isn't the right signup to use. Using a personal account is not the way to get your business on Facebook.
Enter Facebook Pages.
Pages can be created for Local Businesses, Companies, Brands, Products, Artists and Bands, Public Figures, Causes and Entertainment - that's just a handful of different categories. Facebook Pages allow you to create a professional area for other Facebook Users to "Like", interact with and share with their Friends.
But why should you create a Facebook Page, rather than a personal account, especially given you already know how to use my personal account?
- Managing multiple accounts (such as your personal account and your business account) becomes a hassle
There's nothing more time-wasting that having to continually log in and out of Facebook to change who you're interacting as. In fact, it's against Facebook's terms of service to have multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose.
Use Facebook as your Page
By selecting 'Use Facebook as Page' you are able to interact with your fans on Facebook as your page's name, rather than your personal account.
- Facebook Pages do not have friend requests to accept and manage
Do you really want to "accept" people to like your business on Facebook? Use a Page and make it easy and fast for users to follow your business on Facebook, and share it with their friends, without needing your permission to see your posts and find out more about your business.
Options and Settings
Pages have a range of options that let you control what features to enable and disable, as well as who can view your page.
Even though anyone can "Like" your business, it's still possible to control what age ranges or countries can view your business's posts, as well as what users can do - for example, you can enable visitors to upload images to your page - or if you'd prefer not, just as easily disable this option.
- Get your own personalised Facebook business link
When you more than 25 users "Liking" your business on Facebook, you can sign up for a username to make it easy to direct others to your presence on Facebook - for example, ours is easy to remember - www.facebook.com/digitalcookie - you can then use this to help drive more fans to your Page.
- Enable multiple users to manage your business's Facebook page
You can create multiple administrators for each Page, making it easy for a team of Facebook users to manage, respond to and keep an eye on posts and interactions with your fans.
- Build marketing opportunities
You can easily create and manage advertising campaigns for your Facebook page, with power and flexibility to narrow down advertisements to your local community (such as within a given radius of your physical location) to highlight your services to those closest to you.
- Give your Page your unique stamp
There are so many ways to customize your page, from photos to discussions to reviews, as well as enabling people to Check In at your location. It's a great place for you to start to build an online community, and collect feedback from your customers in a public forum.
Facebook Insights
How are your posts getting viewed? Do you have more fans this week? Insights lets you see what is happening to your page, and help you improve and refine your posts.
Just like how Google Analytics can help you learn more about your website's visitors, Insights for your Facebook Page gives you trends and statistics for visitors and interactions to your Facebook posts.
Just remember, as with all ventures into social media, you must have the time and resources dedicated to running and maintaining your presence, interacting with your followers, as well as following a clear online business strategy - poor service and response, lack of updates or a poorly developed Facebook Page can quite quickly damage your business's online professionalism, image and reputation - so when you're ready to take the leap into Facebook, be prepared for the continual and regular work and upkeep that comes with it.
