Facebook: How to Make It Work For Your Business

Facebook can be a useful way to promote your business or an expensive and time-consuming waste of resources. The result depends on your approach, level of commitment and ability to engage your audience.

Facebook’s 900 million users present a great marketing opportunity but only if you produce relevant, engaging and quality content on a regular basis.

Many companies remain unconvinced about the benefits and are reluctant to include Facebook as part of their marketing strategy even though there are significant financial benefits to be gained.

The benefits include increasing your company’s on-line profile, learning from customer feedback and increasing on-line and off-line sales and profits.

While there are financial and resource costs involved in engaging at the level needed there are also significant opportunity costs in choosing not to engage your customers in this way.

Once you make the decision to go ahead and commit to using Facebook to promote your business the following tips may be useful:

  1. Develop your Facebook strategy as part of your overall business strategy and make sure it has support from senior management and/or the owner.
  2. Make sure your content is varied and remains fresh and relevant to your company and audience.
  3. Decide whether you are going to rely solely on the quality of your content or whether you need to offer special incentives or run competitions.
  4. Remember if you are running competitions or offering special incentives they should be directly relevant to your core business and customer.
  5. Make sure you have a wider plan for promotion that includes your website and traditional marketing approaches.
  6. Develop a long-term action plan with adequate resources to ensure you don’t run out of steam and are able to continuously engage your audience.
  7. Remember, you are in this space to engage socially and offer something of value and not to make direct sales.
  8. Make sure to link your Facebook page with your website and other social media platforms.

SO, to make Facebook work for your business think of it as an investment rather than a cost and like any investment make sure you know the rules before you put your money down.

What do you think? Can you make Facebook work for your business? Get in touchwe would love to hear your views contact Nick on 028 8224 9494 or via Twitter @nick_oec.