The majority of businesses these days have a Facebook account but are they using it for its most effective purpose? Most likely not. Social media platforms all have different uses and one should avoid linking them all together so that they all auto-post the same thing.
As Facebook has evolved over the years its use for business has become very clear. Facebook is a tool to promote or ‘get the word out’ about your business. This is achieved by doing Facebook Ads (traditional ads or native ads) or by intelligently crafted Content Marketing.
What Facebook Isn’t
Facebook cannot be considered to be a one on one communication tool with your audience, like Twitter is. Because with FB the person has to become your fan (like your page) before you can initiate contact, whereas on Twitter you can reach out to anyone.
Another thing which Facebook isn’t for is SEO, by getting likes, shares and comments to ‘boost’ your rank. Unfortunately these actions (or social signals as they are called) are not part of Google’s algorithm as they are easy to fake, since anyone can buy likes.
What Facebook is
Simply, Facebook is for entertainment. Users won’t click to ‘like’ a page unless they actually really like the brand and have had a positive experience with it or unless there is some sort of incentive.
FB users don’t want to see posts of business’s coupons or special offers. FB users do want to see posts of interesting, funny, entertaining or useful information, relevant to them.
This means that if you want to get good engagement then you have to carefully plan what you will be posting. For instance, a landscaping company could determine after doing research that its FB fans would find posts about DIY and tips to be quite useful, and therefore work that into their overall strategy.
But then again, just doing posts on FB just for the purpose of getting ‘likes’, ‘comments’, and ‘shares’, etc and engagement serves no purpose, and does not increase revenue.
A small business can post helpful tips, useful videos, pictures of cute cats, etc anything, and get the likes, shares and comments but what does that all result in? Not much. It is for that reason that Facebook is best used for advertising.
Due to the nature of FB, it ‘knows’ a TREMENDOUS amount about its users. Much more than Google knows (save for search habits). Therefore ads in FB allows one to zero in on their audience/demographic with unheard precision, geographically, socially and more. This allows you to reach the right people who need to hear your message and who are interested in your product/service
Additionally ads are getting far more engagement on FB now that they can be put into user’s news feeds and appear along side other ‘natural’ posts.
0 responses