Article Contributed By Suzen Pettit
If kids, soon-to-be-adults and millions of not-so-young adults are your future audience, then you need to have a Facebook Business Page as you need to be where your audience is. And, today, our children, teens, young adults and even older adults like my former room mates and my ex (who deny they are addicted to Facebook) can be found updating their profile, commenting and changing their status updates regularly.
The New York Times even wrote an article recently that showed kids are finding crafty ways to get around the increasing number of Facebook bans their schools are implementing. One eighth grader, who preferred not to be named, said he coached a school administrator on avoiding the ban last year. “She hated not being able to get on Facebook at work and asked for my help one day in the office,” the boy explained, more than a little sympathetic to her plight. “What could I do?”
It came as no surprise to me, and it’s speaking volumes of the need for small businesses, as much as they want to continue down that stream of FB Denial, to get on board and create a Facebook business page. It is time
for them to put themselves in front of this next generation of Facebook addicts.
Need more proof?
5 Reasons Why You Must Setup a Facebook Fan Page Fast!
1) Kids, soon adults, and millions of young and not-so-young adults are your future audience and they are all there, “friending” Justin Bieber under their covers (like my daughter last night) when they should be asleep.
2) With over 600 million users and almost 50% of them on Facebook daily…. stop…. think about it….., AND over 40% of existing businesses already up and running on it, you want your business to be where your customers and potential customers are going, right? If you knew that your customers were passing by one of the huge billboards in Times
Square every day and those billboards didn’t cost millions per month to be advertising there, you would want to be up there…wouldn’t you?
3) Your Facebook business page is like the huge billboard in Times Square except for the fact that it’s free. Your customers are there, their friends are there. And you can say a heck of a lot more on a FB page than you can on a billboard.
4) The search engines love a Facebook Business Page. Because a business page is a public URL and not a private one, your site will have a much easier time making it to the top of a Google search than your website. That’s unless you’ve invested a lot of $ into SEO (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
5) As mentioned earlier, your competition already has a Facebook business page, and not because they want to share about their favorite rice and beans recipe. The “like” button has become the new “link.” Many online marketers, myself included now believe that the Facebook “like” button is becoming just as significant as backlinks to a website. In other words, the more “likes” your page has, the greater the chance of it ranking high in the search engines for your specific field and keywords. So think of it as a link and encourage your customers to press it. Every time you update something on your page these customers will now see it as they have been “linked” to it.
There are so many good reasons to create one of these Facebook business pages I could blather on and on about them forever. For now, think about the math. The average Facebook page has 140 friends. When you post to Facebook, your “friends” and all their “friends” will view your post. Can you spell V-I-R-A-L? As insane as it might sound, there’s a reason why Shop Rite wants you to “like” them on Facebook.
About the Author:
Suzen Pettit specializes in designing, building, marketing and maintaining optimized websites and social media profiles for busy small business owners. By using her strategic internet marketing techniques you will ensure your business is being found and that clients are seeing what YOU want them to see on the internet about you. For even more free tips, tools, strategies and resources, read her free articles at: http://www.omaginarium.com/blog/
