5 Reasons to Use Facebook Business Over A Website
Facebook Business Pages are created for businesses in Facebook. In late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages (pages which allowed companies to promote themselves and attract customers). These started as group pages, but a new concept called company pages was planned. Pages began rolling out for businesses in May 2009. Since Facebook business pages became popular world wide with the benefits it provided to the business owners.
With the revolution of social media platforms, Facebook completely monetized their business pages and the Facebook Business Pages turned in to a single most powerful platform for online marketing. There are many benefits of using a Facebook page over a website and these 5 reasons best describes why Facebook Business Pages are a great marketing tool that is essential.
1. It’s FREE
Before going in to anything, Facebook business page is a free-to-use (freemium) platform that is available to use. It saves you the cost of,
1. Designing a website (Process of making a website)
2. Hiring developers (Developers to make and maintain the website).
3. And best of all, the hosting charges (Business page is hosted in Facebook server).
4. SEO (Cost for search engine optimization)
You can edit your business page by adding relevant information to your business such as products / services in the form of graphics / videos and there are many add-on to choose from to customize your business page as well. You can connect your blog to the page as well. It is also allowed to use RSS feed to circulate your blog posts.
If you are not happy with the Facebook address to your page, you can use a custom website address (URL) and make it to forward to your business page as well.
http://fruitstory.com -----------------> htt://www.facebook.com/fruitstory
2. It Supports Mobile
By default, Facebook pages are mobile friendly (responsive) and you don’t need to worry about how your website will look on thousands of mobile devices out there. Regardless of the mobile platform (Android, iOS, Windows Mobile and Blackberry), you can view the page as it on any device the same. Facebook is optimized to run on all the browsers on any platform, so that you don’t need to worry about making an extra effort to do so. Some web development companies are charging extra to make website responsive and to make them work on different browsers eg: IE- Internet Explorer.
3. Its Interactive
Unlike most of the websites out there, Facebook is one of the most interactive websites you may find as a social media network. You can directly engage with your users by messaging, commenting and reviewing product and services. Your updates are done as post made by your business and administrative users will manage content across your page via power editor.
You can get instant feedback for your marketing efforts by views, link clicks, likes, and shares. You can know who are interested in your product and services (Facebook page fans) and you can directly target these people through your page. This is a huge win 2 win condition as in a normal website, doing so will be an extra effort that will cost you a fortune.
Call-to-Actions Buttons
Facebook business pages consisted with a set of Call-to-Action buttons, which allows users to directly engage with the page and your business. They are predefined actions that you can call in favor of your business.
4. Paid Marketing
If you think your organic marketing efforts on your page is not enough, you can move on to paid marketing. Facebook allows boosting your post reach to engage users you wish to reach to. You can target your users based on,
1. Location, language and interest.
2. Race, religion and gender.
3. Age, relationship status and educational status.
Facebook made some algorithm changes to their business pages in time to make posts visible only to 3%-4% of the page’s fan base. You if want to reach and engage with more customers, you can use the boost feature to achieve your goals.
Facebook ads are a similar platform to Google Ads and you can reach users inside Facebook. The ads created by you will be visible to your target audience, people who search for your content and who has a similar interest in your product or services. Ads will be managed with cost per click and cost per impression basis.
5. Facebook Insights
All the marketing efforts you done on your Facebook business page can be measured instantly with the Facebook Insight, an interface to understand how your Facebook page is performing. In other words, it’s the way of Understand how people are interacting with your Facebook Page, how many people you are reaching, and who those people are. The main benefit is that, insights are real time and you don’t need a third party website for statistics or there is no need to install any scripts to get analytics.
Reach, shares, comments, views, likes are the way to measure interaction & engagement to your page. You can track them with the campaign data to compare and contrast. You don’t have to pay for search engine optimization to reach your clients as you can directly target and reach your customers. You can filter the audience you are trying to reach by targeting through the page.
Every business should be online. Facebook business pages are a cost effective and result oriented strategy you can use with out a deep knowledge in marketing or IT. I recommend it for small businesses that needs to strive in the business world.