Budding Lotus Designs Blog

Why Start a Facebook Business Page?

Benefits of a Facebook Page

As I have mentioned in previous articles Facebook is one of the leaders of Social Media Marketing for your business, and a key step to boost your SEO.  Facebook currently has over 500 million users, which is a vast market that you can easily have access to.  A new field to grow your following, promote events, new products, giveaways, and more.  Once you grow a fan base through Facebook, you are opening up a new avenue of traffic coming back to your website in incoming links, new visitors, more people reading your blog articles, and more clients interacting with you.

Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Promote your Brand
• Access over 500 million people
• Drive more traffic to your website
• Promote Events
• Integrate with your Blog RSS
• Get to know your fans and interact with them
• Its Free!

Facebook Page vs Facebook Profile

Starting out, it is important to understand is the difference between having a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page.  Facebook Profiles are for individual people looking to connect with friends through Facebook.  It is specifically designed to facilitate personal interactions between individuals, family members, friends, colleages, but does not have all of the features that Facebook Pages offers for business.

Facebook does not want businesses creating Facebook profiles for their business, so they have set a limit to the number of friends that you can have on a Profile.  If you reach the limit, they will encourage you to change your Profile into a Page, but they do not facilitate that process in any way.  So don’t make the mistake of creating a Profile for your company, only to find out after all of your hard work, that you have to start over again as a Facebook Page.

The benefits that Facebook offers for businesses are also convincing for why to create a Page instead of a Profile.  As mentioned above, you are not limited to the number of fans you can have which is great for a growing business.  Also, Facebook offers analytics (insights) so that you can see statistics on the success of your business page.  How many fans do you have, how many join each week, which posts are the most popular, how much feedback are you getting etc.  This will help you see currently how successful your Facebook page is and give you ideas of how to improve it.

There are also numerous applications that you can add to your Facebook page to customize it for your businesses needs.  You can run sweepstakes on your page, set up a newsletter sign-up so that your mailing list can grow through Facebook, upgrade your slideshows and more.

Facebook also offers advertising options for their Business Pages.  You can promote your Business Page to their entire pool of users, you set up the pay-per-click pricing, and you can be growing your fan base daily.  I have one client who has received 165 new users over the 12 days she has been running her Facebook ad.  She sees great value in the growth.

If you have never ventured into Facebook before, don’t be shy and don’t feel like you have to understand it all in one big swoop.  I have many clients who start out slowly, and with time I am pleasantly surprised with all of the fun they are having using it to promote their business.

Once you have created your Facebook page, be sure to check out my article on creating a username for your Facebook Page.