Gone are the days that Facebook is only for personal use. With astounding numbers behind the social media giant — 1.15 billion users, 700 million daily users, 20 min of average time per Facebook visit, and 8.3 hours of average time each user spends per month — B2C businesses would be missing out a great marketing opportunity if they don’t have or fully utilize their Facebook page.
They’re many benefits to having a Facebook page. First of all, it’s a fast and easy way to reach new customers. As people start to engage with your comments, posts or other things on your Facebook page, it will trickle down to their friends. The interaction continues to spread out, and your Facebook Page is constantly reaching new people. Another benefit is that if you’re a local brick and mortar business, people can search for your products or services on Facebook and find you using its powerful search function.
Having a Facebook page also helps you understand your target market. Other than the fact that it provides a channel for immediate feedback from your audience, Facebook’s robust insights feature offers stats for you to understand the demographic of your audience, and find what your fans and their friends find interesting. In addition, the graph search feature enables you to understand where your fans are spending time when they’re not checking out your page, so you could understand their interest and market to them more effectively.
Obviously having a Facebook page is only the first step, and getting your page in front of more people and building your Facebook page community is essential. Some easy ways to start this off are inviting all your Facebook friends to like your page and sharing your page on your own profile. Other ways to promote your Facebook page are adding a like box in your website, mentioning your Facebook page on your other social media channels, and inviting people in your e-marketing to like your page.
Engagement is key when you’re building your Facebook page community — you want them to like, post, comment or share your content. Consistently post good content in various formats including text, photo, video, links etc., and add a call to action at the end of your posts. A great way to engage your users is to create an interactive poll to gauge interest on things, ask questions and really get your users involved in what you want to know from them. Facebook give away or contest is also effective in terms of boosting engagement from your Facebook community.
It’s worth noting that when you’re contemplating on a Facebook content strategy, don’t only post about your business, but rather aim to build your page as a community hub. That builds trust in your community instead of creating an impression that you’re only interested in getting their business. If your page becomes a community hub, your fans will be more engaged and keep coming back.
Facebook marketing can bring great benefits to B2C businesses and it’s important to utilize Facebook page to its full potential. In the next blog post I’ll talk about two of the most overlooked features on Facebook Page: Facebook events and Facebook ads.
