FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGES

Why You Need a Facebook Business Page

Posted on June 8th, 2011

Anyone who has a business of any size should have a Facebook business page, not to be confused with your own personal page! If you don't already have one setup below are all the reasons you could ever need to make your mind up.

So go on, get reading....

• There are over 600 million active Facebook users
• 48% of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up
• 35+ year olds represent over 30% of the Facebook userbase
• 57% of people talk more online than they do in real life

In 20 minutes on Facebook there are

• 1 million links shared
• 1.48 million event invites
• 1.97 million friend requests accepted
• 2.71 million photos uploaded
• 2.71 messages sent
• 1.32 million photos tagged
• 1.85 million status updates
• 1.58 million wall posts; and
• 10.2 million comments made

Branding

Business pages allow you to exert your companies presence much more effectively than trying to use your own personal facebook account. On a business page you can add your company logo and change the layout and look to make the experience much more like visiting a website thus keeping your branding consistent across all platforms both online and offline. This leaves you free to maintain your personal friendships out of the limelight of your professional responsibilities.

SEO

Google and other search engines love social media!

Business pages on Facebook (unlike personal pages) are constantly crawled by search engines for their every growing content, this means that all of the posts you post to your fan base can and will be indexed by Google which means it can be potentially found by people searching on Google and the other engines.

Linking back to content on your own website from your business page will encourage others to link to your content, which in turn not only drives great traffic and business to your site but will also help you improve your website rankings.

Worldwide Forum

• There are 1,723,500 Facebook users 18 years or older in Ireland
• There are over 600 Million users on Facebook worldwide (100 times the population of Ireland)
• The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes a day on Facebook
• 50% of Facebook users login every single day

Unlimited Fans

Business pages have unlimited fans/likes where as personal pages have a limit of 5000 friends.

5000 friends may seem like a figure that you would never reach, especially for smaller businesses, but the other good thing about the business page is that you can contact all of your "fans" at one time via updates, where you would be limited from a personal page. Besides why put a limit on something that you do not have to right?

Analytics

With Facebook Insights you can track how people interact with your business page by demographic (location, age, gender etc.) and interaction (with posts, comments, images attracted the most attention) meaning you can continually fine tune the content you output to keep your audience happy and engaged.

Add Another Shop Window

You can setup your Facebook page to sell products directly to your fan base without the need to send them to your main website.

Interaction

With Facebook you can interact with your customer base on a totally different level than you normally would on most company websites. You can conduct market research by running Poll's, initate debates, ask questions of your customers and vica versa along with sharing photos, videos and other content.

Media

It has never been easier to post multimedia files to your target customer base. With Facebook you dont need an expensive website CMS to post photos, vidoes and audio files which is priceless when it comes to engaging with your customers. The more varied and interesting content you keep putting up on your page the more fans you will keep and attract.

Events

Facebook is an ideal way of informing your fans and the wider public of events and attractions your company is associated with.