How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Small Business

Nowadays, an ever increasing number of businesses are making use of Facebook to find new customers, build various online communities of fans and dig into mines of demographic information. Facebook is a social media interface that can be used for different reasons by different people. For most of the businesses, the best places to start are the Facebook Pages which differ from the individual profiles and Facebook groups in many different ways. These pages allow the businesses to collect “fans” and interact with potential clients and customers that contribute to their growth and success. Hence, it is important for every small business owners and entrepreneurs to learn how to use Facebook to promote their small businesses.

Web presence for your business
It is very easy to create a Web presence with the help of Facebook even if the companies do not have their own website. The company pages on Facebook can be customized with photos, comments and other useful information. Further, the users can also add videos or various business applications. The pages that portray the true personality of the business turn out to be more successful.

The human interaction
Facebook is actually less about selling and more about interacting. Engaging with the fans and the critics improves personal relations and makes the pages quite famous. This is extremely important where it comes to successfully mining the potential customers. It is always better to have feedback from the existing customers. The users can successfully pick up ideas for making the business better by improving on the drawbacks. The content of the web page needs to be kept fresh. For this purpose even the status updates and the newsfeeds can be used in order to inform the fans about the specials, events, contests or anything that is of interest to them.

Targeted marketing for small businesses
Facebook can also enable the small businesses to engage in targeted internet marketing. As the user creates an ad, he can add certain demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users actually fit into the target audience and modify and make necessary changes so as to target the right kind of people. The advertisers can pay per impression or per click and can also set maximum budgets and schedule for the ad to run on specific dates. The Facebook ad system provides feedback immediately with metrics such as the number of impressions and the clicks through.

Success needs time and patience
What is necessary in case of these social media sites is patience. People often leave and switch over when they do not see instant results. In reality therefore, very few companies are successfully exploiting this channel to promote their business. Forming a Facebook fan page is a fantastic way to engage with the public. And if it is done in the right way, it can be a huge success. It is the perfect way to create the necessary brand awareness. Facebook groups also provide a free way to carry out the market research with the help of the polls by the fans and the companies can successfully gauge the reaction of the people to ideas before they are implemented.

With more than 750 million active users on Facebook, it is very hard to not be lured in by the great opportunity that it can provide for the business. But it is very important to understand how to use Facebook effectively in order to reap maximum benefits.