The Advantages of Facebook for Businesses

So what are the advantages of Facebook for businesses? 2014 will see another huge leap in advertising revenues on Facebook.

In Great Britain, Facebook users spend around 62 million hours each year and almost a third of the UK’s Facebookers spend on average one hour every single day keeping up to date with whats going on within their social network making Facebook the prime location to spend your advertising budget.

Previously, Facebook had a bad reputation for their advertising strategy but with the recruitment of Sheryl Kara Sandberg from Google, things have really picked up over the past two years or so.

One of the keys to running an effective social media campaign is firstly identifying your audience and then finding a way to encourage engagement from them. One of the most effective ways of doing this could be by adding an incentive to like your page such as offering a discount voucher to people who like or share your posts.

Comparing Google AdWords to Facebook advertising is something I get asked often, but in my eyes, its pretty difficult to put the two of them in the same bracket. Ideally, having a budget for both would be a perfect scenario but its all about figuring out what is best for your business.

We have run Facebook campaigns for a number of our clients in 2013, some of which were extremely effective (For a total budget of just £7 one of our clients managed to grow their Facebook likes by nearly 300 people), others not so great, but the real benefits for a small to medium sized business advertising on Facebook would be that you can use their advertising tool to drill down into your target market such as location and age group and your budget can start at as little as £1 per day.

For example in Coventry, there are just over 140,000 Facebook users aged between 21 years and 55 years old which could be the ideal target for a pub, restaurant or bar.

Finally, the second biggest advantage of Facebook for businesses is that when people have liked your page, you have your target audience sat there ready to see your page updates which means that you wont always need to shell out money when you are marketing towards your chosen customer base and your posts will stay in there timeline for a few hours at the very least. (Unless of course they have liked your page but opted to unsubscribe from your new feed).

I would say if you are going to give it a go, take some time to put a strong campaign together, show it to friends and family to get good honest feedback and seriously consider the benefits of liking your page from your audiences point of view.