If you’re in the business world, you’ve probably been told you need a Facebook page. But do you know why? What is the true value of a Facebook business page? The fact is, if you’re using your business page properly, there are numerous ways that you can reap benefits for your business. Here are just 5 major reason that your business needs to be on Facebook.
Learn about Your Audience
How much do you know about your business’s target demographic? Do you know their shopping habits? Do you know the things they look for in a product or service like yours? Facebook offers you the invaluable opportunity to engage with your desired audience. It’s like having a worldwide focus group, allowing you to get feedback to improve your business to be the ideal for your consumers.
Facebook even offers a tool called Facebook Insights, which allows you to learn even more about your audience. It provides useful information about how your fans engage with your page, which can tell you how you need to change your business or your online presence.
Humanize Your Business
Consumers want to know there’s a person behind the business they’re working with. That can be hard to do when you never actually get to interact with a person. Facebook pages give you many chance to humanize your business by building a brand image on your page, as well as allowing you to respond to people’s questions and comments on your posts.
Improve Your SEO Ranking
Search engine optimization (SEO) determines where you rank in search engine results for relevant terms. If you’re a dentist in Indiana, and someone searches on Google for “Indiana dentist,” you’d hope that you’d be on the first page of those results, so that they’d be more likely to find your business instead of a competitor.
Many business owners know how to optimize their own websites for SEO, but too few realize that your Facebook page can actually improve your search engine rankings. Facebook pages offer you an opportunity to provide rich, relevant content to your target audience every day. If you’re active on Facebook and constantly sharing high-quality information, your business Facebook page can actually put you at the top of the search engine results.
Share Success Stories
When your product or service works for someone, how do you share that story? If you’re like most businesses, you’ll just feature the person’s testimonial on your website. But those don’t get a lot of notice. A Facebook page allows you to highlight the successes of individuals by sharing their stories in a place that is easily seen by others. And, as an added bonus, the stories can be shared with others.
For example, on the Facebook page for professional business consultant Sam Ovens, you’ll see the success stories of many of his students, who took his course to become consulting professionals themselves. While he could feasibly just highlight these stories on a website, sharing them on a Facebook page makes them more accessible and shareable, which can drive more traffic to the page and his site.
That’s Where Consumers Are
According to recent statistics, over 2 billion people get on Facebook every day. If there were a billboard on a freeway that had 2 billion people passing it every day, would you want to use it? Probably. And while you won’t put your business in front of every person on Facebook every day, the fact remains that your consumers are on social media—probably more than once a day.
Recently, Facebook added the ability for users to post a status update specifically to gather recommendations for goods and services. These specialized status updates allow people to link to businesses they’ve used, giving the requester a map of locations they can try. What does this mean? Your potential consumers are on Facebook, asking for your goods and services right now. And if you’re not on Facebook too, then you’re missing out.
