Whether you are a person who likes social media or not, if you’re in business, there is a good chance that at some point you’ve considered FaceBook for your business. Understanding what the benefits are, is an important step to knowing what your working towards and can expect.
The benefits of FaceBook for any business come down to audience size (over 2.6 billion active monthly users), frequency of visits by its users (over 52% return multiple times per day), and the community atmosphere in which your brand can be a participant in.
What do these benefits mean for your business and which should you focus on?. Let’s cover the “must focus”, “should focus”, and “nice to focus” benefits that you need to consider.
Facebook Benefits for Your Business Nuts and Bolts
Although we can become somewhat numb to numbers these days, especially when they’re followed by “billions”, the audience size can say a lot about the potential of a marketing channel. Let’s face it, with 2.6 billion active monthly users, you know a good deal of your ideal clients are on Facebook.
But audience size is one thing. Engagement is another, and this is where Facebook really shines. That 2.6 billion is “active monthly users”. Of those users, 1.73 billion, Facebook reports are active daily! That’s massive potential to reach your audience now.
In fact, as noted, as 52% return to the site multiple times per day, which lends itself perfectly to repeated brand exposure. This is more important now than ever in history with so much demand for people’s attention. Once exposed just isn’t enough anymore.
In advertising, it is said that you want to enter the conversation going on in your future customer’s head. What are their challenges, their aspirations, and what is important to them right now?
Facebook provides a community, that you can not only tap into but actually search out and join the conversation.
This is very powerful when used properly, which would involve good targeting, and engaging in the conversations that are happening and your brand can participate in.
Benefits of FaceBook Page Likes
There are different types of ‘Likes’ that Facebook likes can apply to. First, there are page likes. Having people that are interested in your brand and services, like your Facebook page, gives you a more direct ability to connect and share with that person.
But what about post likes. Is there value beyond vanity in these types of likes? By its nature, social media is well, social. So if you’re my friend and I like a post, there is a good chance, you will see that post driving some viral aspects to the post, even if you don’t like the page that I liked the post from.
Beyond the ability to compound your reach, a post with many likes, has a certain degree of social proof. Think about if you see a post that catches your attention.
If that post has lots of likes, shares, and comments, are you more likely to pay attention? In most cases, the answer will be a resounding yes. We tend to direct our focus to where the majority are, and social media is no different.
Benefits of FaceBook Shares and Comments
Shares and comments add additional benefits to Facebook for your business. Of course, there is the viral aspect we mentioned in the ‘Likes’ section, and there are the psychological benefits of social proof.
But comments and shares, take more time for a user to contribute than a “like”. There is a little bit of work involved, so there tend to be fewer. More importantly, you are now entering the direct conversation with your audience. In their own words they’re identifying what’s important to them.
You’re gaining the knowledge of the language they use, the degree of importance of a topic, pain, or ambition. If you take this valuable information and apply it to future marketing messages, you can do so with confidence that you are entering the conversation that is not only important but currently going on in their heads.
Benefits of FaceBook Advertisements
This is a large topic, and I will reference additional posts on this topic at the bottom of this post. However, as a high-level overview, Facebook advertising has some very unique and powerful attributes to its service.
For starters and possibly most important, is Facebook’s ability to target the audience based on interests and behavior. Again at a raw psychological level what does this mean and how good is this intel?
Well, people go on Facebook to connect with friends and family. They are triggered by Ads that mean something to them, and brands that they know, like, and trust. It’s not scripted, it’s not searching, its actual behavior.
Having the ability to tap into this data, and use it to better target your own audience can be the most powerful tool in your toolbox. Knowing a person likes a particular brand that is in line with your own product, and has displayed interest (through actions) in a particular topic, problem, or cause, can increase your targeting chances immensely.
In fact, Facebook even provides the ability to create “look-a-like” audiences. So an audience that looks like “this” (attributes, interests, behavior), likes a certain brand, can be mirrored an independently targeted with your ads for testing.
The other point to note about Facebook advertising is the robust reporting and analytics that you are given access to. Not only can this help improve your advertising effectiveness, but with the data collected, you can use the information to improve other marketing initiatives you are deploying.
Benefits of FaceBook Groups
Through bringing your audience into special groups you create on Facebook, you’re able to create a sub-community within the bigger community of Facebook.
There are a lot of benefits here beside of course the benefit of the community, and direct conversation with people that are interested in your product or brand. These benefits, of course, are key benefits to Facebook as a whole just at a more targeted level.
However, in a group, that your members have opted into, you have the benefit of bypassing a lot of the algorithm challenges Facebook inherently puts into its news feed.
Specifically, if you have a friend on Facebook, that you have not engaged within some period, including but not limited to, spent time in their post, reading, commenting, liking, or sharing, eventually you’ll be hard-pressed to see any of their posts at all.
Facebook controls this feed and determines that if you’re not engaging with that user, then your interest must be lower. Now it takes work to actually see what they’re posting and updating.
However, in a group, a user controls this visibility. They’re able to quickly and easily see the updates (all the updates) in the group. They’ll receive notifications of updates, much like a message has been left for them.
This allows your exposure with the people that matter (those that like your brand, product, or service) to be much greater thereby increasing the potential return on your marketing investment in these areas.
Final Thoughts and Summary
It’s important to note, that whether you personally like or don’t like Facebook, or whether you use or don’t use Facebook, that your audience is in fact there. This alone should make your interest levels peak for this social media channel.
But the ability to tap into the benefits mentioned in this article, coupled with the unique opportunity to market in a very personal way to your audience, should be making you race to learn more about how to use Facebook to grow your business.
Highly Recommended Reading for FaceBook
Need more convincing? Check out 15 more jaw-dropping benefits that make Facebook worth your businesses attention.
Facebook advertising is critical to gain any type of momentum on Facebook. But it’s important to understand the pros and cons of this advertising channel.
Finally often what can hurt us is even more important than what can help us. Discover what you don’t know about Facebook and how it could hurt your marketing efforts.
