According to Scott Ayres of PostPlanner.com here are the top ten benefits of having a Facebook page for your business. Increased exposure to potential customers – With over a billion and a half active users many of your customers are regularly logging into Facebook and this is a good opportunity to expose them to your message.
- Gather new leads – Many companies use Facebook to conduct contests, give aways, etc. through which they get potential customers to voluntarily submit their contact info such as email addresses and phone numbers.
- Lower your marketing expense – A Facebook presence for your business is free. If you do want to invest some money Facebook ads are relatively inexpensive when compared to traditional print, radio or TV ads and are much more targeted.
- Reach a targeted audience – Just because there are over a billion and a half users does not mean they will all see your ad. But Facebook pushes your ad only to those persons for whom it is relevant geographically (within a certain mile radius of a physical business) and/or by key words and prior search terms that users have used.
- Use Facebook insights – Facebook provides easy to interpret figures, charts and graphs that illustrate how many persons are being exposed to your message and how many are taking action based on it. Using these metrics you can see not only how your content on Facebook is performing, but the demographics of the persons who are engaging with your content.
- Build brand loyalty – These days when persons are making a decision about a product to purchase, they often look to their social network on Facebook to see how others felt about the service. The ratings feature of Facebook allows prior customers to rate and comment on the business. People place a high degree of value in the decision making process before a purchase based on the expressed prior experiences of their peers.
- Increase web traffic – It is great for prospective customers to visit the Facebook page of the business, but it is even better if they link out to visit the actual website of the business. Facebook encourages this by generating a full-width thumbnail image of your website.
- Boost Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – While there is a changing art and science to search engine optimization, certainly the more visitors to your website then the higher it will rank in search engine returns. So when you are using Facebook to drive traffic to your main website that is a positive thing.
- Be mobile ready – Facebook is doing the heavy lifting for you by making sure that the content about your business is viewable on mobile devices such as phones. When people view your Facebook page on a mobile device they can typically very clearly see the hours of operation, address, reviews and a phone number.
- Spy on your competition – Facebook provides a “pages to watch” feature that will provide you with metrics about the utilization of the Facebook of other businesses, including your competition. Who knows, they may be tracking you as well.