Are you a Marketing Director or Office Manager trying to convince your boss that it’s about time to get your business on Facebook? Or are YOU the boss, wondering “why should my business be on Facebook?” You can refer to this blog post to make your case. Read on…
Why Should My Business Be On Facebook?
Here are specific reasons and statistics that you, the soon-to-be Facebook Manager, can tell your boss:
Number One: You’ll easily be able to measure your results and report back to your supervisor. There are two important things to measure your performance by in Facebook: Reach and Engagement.
Reach = The number of people who SEE your posts appear in their Timelines.
Engagement= The ACTIONS people take with your posts (likes, shares, comments).
You can spend very little money to get your Facebook posts seen (REACH) by people in your local area or nationally (or Internationally) whom you target according to THEIR interests. These interests would match your services or products. Example: A dentist in Denver, Colorado, who specializes in babies, toddlers and children, can pay $10 per day for nine days to get a Facebook post (all about dental health for children) seen by 5,300 – 14,000 interested people PER DAY.
This post would only be shown to people interested in dental health for their kids.
The total Reach is potentially 310,000 people! So, for $90 bucks, your company gets seen by 310,000 targeted potential customers within 50 miles of your office. This reason alone should convince your supervisor that Facebook is the place to begin your social media marketing.
Getting outstanding Reach is literally having 5,000 – 10,000 (or more) pairs of eyeballs looking only at your company’s post, which takes up the entire mobile screen… and they’re looking at it for two, maybe three seconds or they actually read it and give it a Like or better yet: they write a positive comment (which you’ll want to thank them for and converse with them). Even better would be to get shares of your post in the double-digits or more. Imagine 33 people sharing your branded post with their 33 networks of Facebook friends and family. Think about how amazing that is – to have 33 instant Brand Ambassadors (at least for a few seconds) who share your message with their friends. This fact alone should convince your CEO or supervisor to move forward with strategic Social Media plans that get measurable and positive goals achieved for your company.
Number Two: Facebook is used by 1.01 billion people on a daily basis, according to Facebook. This is a 17% increase year over year (Source: Facebook as 9/30/15).
Number Three: There are 1.39 billion mobile active users (Source: Facebook as of 9/30/15) –Which is an increase of 23% year-over-year.
Number Four: With 1.59 billion monthly users, (up 14% over 2015) has more monthly active users than WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram –combined. (Source: CNBC) Side Note: WhatsApp has been bought by Facebook since this stat was first cited.
Number Five: One out of every five Page Views occurs on Facebook. This means that chances are extremely high that your potential customers are hanging out on Facebook. (Source: Infodocket 2012)
Side Note: In future blog posts of mine, I’ll help you figure out what time of day your tribe of potential fans and customers likes to visit and spend time on Facebook; plus, I’ll write step-by-step instructions on how to set up a Facebook page (lots of choices of types of pages); design tips and cover image dimensions for Facebook; how to schedule posts; how to create attractive graphics for posts; what a “boost” is and how it gets you in front of thousands or millions of people interested in your subject matter; how to research and create high-conversion ad campaigns; and so much more. And I’ll be writing about how to create the types of posts that will get likes, shares and comments (Engagement). Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss a post.
Number Six: Average time spent on Facebook on a daily basis is 18 minutes. You probably know friends and family members who spend at least an hour or more per day, right? Maybe you do, too. Think about how many “sponsored” posts you’ve seen about subjects that interest you. Maybe you’ve noticed that some of these sponsored posts were already liked by your friends (Facebook lists a few of them in the post and says: “Janie liked this”). You might have clicked on these to see what they are about and next thing you know you’ve liked a new page, partially because you saw some of your friends had already liked that page. You were influenced by the behavior of your friends. Facebook makes a lot of money off of that fact of life.
Number Seven: Your competitors are already on Facebook and doing a good job of getting a decent amount of engagement.
Or: Your competitors are NOT on Facebook yet, so now we’ve just identified a huge opportunity to stake out territory your competitors haven’t established yet.
Or: Your competitors are on Facebook but they’re getting hardly any engagement so we have an opportunity to establish a large market share.
I could list several more statistics to convince your boss as to why you should be marketing in Facebook but what if your boss says this:
“If We Do This Right, Are We Going To Get More New Customers By Being In Facebook?”
The answer is: yes. If you do it right, you will get more new customers, eventually. Depending on how much time you have, how creative you are and how much of a monthly advertising budget you have, you could do quite well with Facebook marketing. Of course, you’ll need to decide what will be your magic number to measure success by. Will it be that you’ll get X number of more Page Views on your website? Or will you get X number of more phone calls per week? Or will you measure the number of transactions?
But the best way to describe the answer to the valid question “why should my business be on Facebook” is this: trust, credibility and “location, location, location.” If you don’t have a Facebook Business Page, your customers or potential customers will wonder why not. They’ll start to make wrong assumptions about your company and they may end up finding competitors’ Facebook pages and start to like them instead of you. If your supervisor is old enough to remember the Yellow Pages directory (the paper version), tell her/him: “This is the 21st century Yellow Pages except 10 times more effective for a fraction of the cost.”
Hopefully, your company will get going on its strategy and goal and action plan for Facebook marketing soon after reading my blog post. If so, that’s great!
Now you’ve gotten what you wished for. You’ve been given the task of doing your company’s Social Media, starting with Facebook.
Relax! You’ve just found the perfect blog to read to help you implement what could be one of the most important marketing initiatives for your company.
Right now, you might not have the slightest idea of what to do in Facebook on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Come back here and read more tips. I’ve got eight years’ worth of Facebook marketing advice to share with you.
