Facebook: why use it?

We've all heard what a great tool Facebook is for marketing your business, haven't we? Social Media Marketing, or SMM, is a term that gets bandied about quite a bit these days. SMM covers a whole range of websites, with Facebook being one of the main ones.

For those of you who are completely new to using Facebook for business marketing it can be difficult to know where to start. My plan is to write a series of short articles, introducing you to Facebook for business. So let's start at the beginning: why use Facebook?

Facebook allows you to reach your customers in a completely different way to traditional marketing. Facebook is all about engaging with your customers and building relationships. An example of this would be:

A customer buys a product from you, you package it up with a card saying "Happy with your purchase? Leave us a message on our Facebook page" (or something along those lines) and giving the address of your Facebook page. The customer goes to the page, 'likes' it, and leaves a comment saying how delighted they are with the product. You reply to that, making the customer feel appreciated. Three very positive things will have just happened:

1. You will have made the customer feel very good about you, meaning they are more likely to buy from you again.
2. The customer will now see anything you post on your Facebook page in their own Facebook account, keeping your business fresh in their mind.
3. The customer's Facebook friends will have seen that they left a positive comment on your page, which will have acted as word of mouth.

Now, who wouldn't want that level of interaction and visibility for their business?

I'll be putting a mention of this article on our own Facebook page so why not pop in and see us? In fact leave us a comment while you're there - we'd be delighted to hear from you and answer any questions.