Top 5 Reasons to Use Facebook for Your Business

Established in 2006 as a social site for college students to mingle, Facebook has since gone on to attract millions upon millions of users of all ages worldwide, making it one the most popular sites ever in Internet history.

Facebook users flock to the site for a variety of reasons, such as online games, photo sharing, catching up, planning events, and more. However, a good majority of users have found that Facebook provides a convenient way to make informed buying decisions, keep up with their favorite brands, discover new products, and find new companies and businesses.

In fact, Facebook now has more than 1 BILLION users. This, of course, is beneficial to businesses as they have the potential to draw in customers from all over the globe.

If you have not yet made a business presence on Facebook – the 5 reasons listed below may change your mind.

* Facebook gives your company a personality. Since Facebook is all about engaging with others and sharing information, it’s the perfect platform for a business to humanize itself through one-on-one conversations, community messages, contests, Q&A sessions, and more. Companies that actively communicate with customers and followers have better chances of obtaining new customers and retaining current ones. Moreover, real-time customer service allows consumers to have a sense of trust, which ultimately will lead to more business.

* Facebook is currently visited more than any other social media site. Although it’s always a good idea to have a presence on all the major social networking sites, Facebook is extremely important as it brings in millions of daily regular users worldwide. In addition, a good number of Facebook users use the site to learn about new products and trends, get service recommendations, and help others make informed buying decisions.

* Facebook offers all companies and professionals their own free business page. In a matter of minutes, you can easily create your own page, complete with company information, pictures, events, product listings, and more. Additionally, your followers and customers will have a convenient way to engage with other like-minded people and share recommendations. If you have not yet set up your own business page, click the link below to get started: https://www.facebook.com/pages

* You can track the effectiveness of your company’s online social media presence. Facebook’s integrated tools and applications on business pages allows you to determine the makeup of your customer base, their shopping habits, and how likely they are to purchase from your business. Moreover, Facebook offers an “Insights” feature on all business accounts. The “Insights” feature allows you to see what kind of reach and impact each of your posts have had. It also can determine the age group, gender, and locations of the people that have read your posts.

* Your business page is public and searchable by millions of Facebook users. In addition, when people give your page a “Like,” it becomes visible in their News Feed. This means that their own Facebook friends will most likely see your company name as long as they share the pages they are fans of. Furthermore, Facebook ranks high on major search engines. By incorporating the proper keywords and staying active on your account, not only will your Facebook business page move up in search engine results, but your company website and other social media accounts can potentially move up as well.

 

Did you know that we can fully manage your Facebook Business presence. Currently we manage well over 200 Business pages. We know what works and can help you get the most out of your social media presence.

Want to know more? check out a few of our plans at:

http://eziadvertising.com/packages-available/social-media/

 

 

Social Media Managers to Get New Tool for Fielding Feedback on Facebook

Social media has forever transformed the way that reputation managers and PR professionals go about their daily business. So much has this been true, that companies now regularly hire “social media managers,” professionals who are solely responsible for posting on social media, responding to customer mentions and messages, and sourcing/writing new content to keep people interested in liking, sharing, and interacting with a brand.

Facebook, which still sits atop its throne as the biggest social media platform around, is about to roll out the ability to answer comments privately. In the past, companies were limited to responding via the same Facebook channel that they were contacted on (responding to comments by commenting, messages by messaging, etc.). Now, Facebook page managers will have a new option to click when fielding page comments which will take the comment conversation into a private thread with that individual. The thread will include a link to the original comment, and will allow the two parties to communicate privately.

Of course, as the tool is used more and more, more individuals will likely take advantage of the increased speed and communication with companies on Facebook. This will mean an increase in the amount of messaging threads that social media managers have to deal with. To help alleviate message overload, Facebook also announced that they will be introducing new messaging tools.

One of the most welcome additions will be the way in which companies can save boilerplate responses and messages to commonly asked questions. Customers can therefore be easily responded to and would cut down on the time spent servicing the most common, easy-to-fix issues. This feature has been in testing for several months now, but it will soon be available to everyone.

Facebook itself is one of the fastest growing customer support platforms on the planet, and Facebook has created more incentives for companies to use their pages as their primary response method. For one, the company has created a badge that will display on company pages in order to let customers know that a page is very responsive to its messages and feedback. For the badge to display, Facebook pages will have to respond to 90% or more of their customer messages and have a median response time of five minutes or less; data will be based upon the last seven days. It’s unclear if “hours of operation” will be available so that companies won’t lose face their status if their support would not normally be open 24 hours per day (or perhaps this itself is a requirement).

What does this mean for you? It means that Facebook is getting more useful as a customer management tool, but along with it will come more responsibility and the need to learn new tools and functions. Let’ be honest, though: If you’re managing social media for a company you’re already likely a digital native who gets excited about such updates, rather than shying away from a new social challenge.