Friday, 12 August 2011

How To Get Maximum Benefits of Facebook Business Pages

The mission of Facebook is, "Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected". Facebook business pages are among one of the tools developed by Facebook to achieve this mission.

Facebook business pages are a great way to promote any business online. People and organizations are using it for marketing and promotion of their products, services or other businesses. The results of facebook marketing are really impressive for some of them. However, a majority of business owners and organizations are not able to drive their campaigns to success. The reason lies in their inability to adopt the best practices of facebook marketing through facebook business pages.


This article describes some of the best tips for promotion of businesses through facebook business page:

Understand The Concept Behind Facebook Pages

Facebook pages are similar to profiles. Some of the basic differences are they are specially meant for businesses, organizations and public figures. In addition, they also offer some special advantages. For example, the number of people, liking a Facebook page is not limited as it is limited to 5000 friends for normal profiles. For inviting people to like your page, you do not need to know them personally or through mutual relationship. If your page matches their interest, you can invite them.

Select Right Option While Creating Your Facebook Page

Facebook understands the basic promotional needs of modern businesses. The promotional requirements may vary depending upon the type of a business. Therefore, facebook offers different options for creating a page, each one with its own set of advantages. While creating a business page, it is very important to select the right type of page to get maximum advantage. If the page is intended for a local business, it is strictly advised to select the option "Local Business or Place". Selecting any other option may not deliver expected results.

Make Your Page True Representative of Your Business

Facebook pages are very much flexible and easy to setup. To get the maximum potential benefits, people need to make it true representative of their businesses. For that, they need to provide sufficient information about their businesses. Provide basic details of your business in info tab. It is exactly like "About Us" page of a website, where people look for the basic details about the company, person, or product.

To make it more beneficial and engaging for targeted audience, it is better to keep the language informal. Therefore, it is always better to write fresh contents in casual tone for your facebook audience.

Create Custom Tab Using FBML

Facebook also offers the facility to add custom tabs using FBML (Facebook Markup Language, which is Facebook’s own, special version of HTML). Using custom tabs, people can add any additional content for their fans (targeted audience). One of the most important uses of Facebook custom tabs is for creating landing pages. It can be a wonderful way to provoke your targeted audience towards your products or services. Creating a landing page for different types of users, result in greater benefits of marketing through facebook business page.

Create Your Fan Base

One your page is ready with enough informative contents about your business, you are ready to create and enhance your fan base on facebook. Remember, you have more than 700 millions of people to spread your words among them. To start with, invite your friends to be a fan of your facebook business page. It will help you create initial fan base. Join some groups matching the interests of your business or products. Engage yourself in activities and discussions within the group. It will help you develop an identity among fellow group members. Then you can invite people from the group to become your fan. Later on, once you develop credibility, you will get referral fans too.

Engage People With Your Business Page

The most important factor for the success of facebook marketing campaigns is "your engagement with the audience". Only creating a fan base is not enough. You need to engage your fans with your page on facebook. For that, post status updates which can attract attention of your fans. Provide relevant contents in form of status updates, which should be informative enough to drag your fan’s attention. Be prompt in responding to their comments over your status updates or wall posts. Some great ideas for status updates can be:
  1. Announcements regarding your products and services
  2. Links to interesting and useful online resources
  3. Discount coupon codes to save on your products or services
  4. Links to information related to your company, its products or services, or people
Another beneficial way of enhancing interactivity of your page is to ask interesting questions from your fans. It will develop interaction between you and your fans as well as interaction of fans with other fans on your page. Keep them informed about the promotional offers and events of their interest. It is also beneficial to offer a reward program especially for your facebook fans.

Listen To Your Fans/Customers

Facebook business page can be a great tool for Customer Relationship Management. You can create a custom application for customer’s complaint or queries and devote some time to response to them regularly. People nowadays have become addicted to facebook and if you offer customer support through facebook, it will help you develop credibility among such customers. They will spread the word about you among their friends and acquaintances.

Avoid Spamming Through Your Facebook Page

Your status updates and wall posts on facebook page are very important for the identity of your business. Posting irrelevant statuses may result in a negative reputation. You updates are visible on the news feed of your fans. Continuous updates can fill their news feed and if it is uninformative and of no use to them, it will be spam, resulting in their lost interest in your brand and business.

View Page Insights and Analyze Your Performance Regularly
Facebook offers great ways to analyze the impacts of facebook promotion campaigns. Using "Page Insights" features, you can analyze the performance of your facebook page. It offers great statistics of your page, fans, page activities, interactions, and demographic details. Tracking these details will help you understand the positives and negatives and you can modify your facebook marketing strategies accordingly.

Aforementioned tips are among the most basic things that you need to implement with your facebook business pages. If you own an online or offline business that needs promotion, and which is still not on facebook; you are missing great business potential. Come, create a facebook business page and start exploring your options today itself. However, do not forget to focus aforementioned tips while you start your facebook promotion.

Happy Facebooking!!!

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