Facebook for Business - becoming more and more relevant
A few days ago some long anticipated updates were made to the capability of Facebook business pages, much to my delight as a marketer.
Some may still think me naïve to care about changes to such a tool (not seeing it as business relevant) – I challenge such people to find a business domestically that doesn’t have at least one twelfth of their extended community on Facebook (given 1 in every 12 people in the world now uses Facebook…).
Is your business on Facebook? If not, why not? It’s free to use, it’s an opt-in communication tool….and a perfect incubator for the viral passion so beneficial for the typical kiwi business – small, and winning on either a niche ability/innovation or excellence of service.
Yes, you put yourself in the potential firing line for the ever-feared negative feedback, but anyone educated in marketing (or anyone who’s thought long enough about it) knows that it is not unusual for a customer’s perception of a company to actually improve after a complaint process – if said complaint is well handled.
Now that I’ve convinced the few non-believers, let me tell you how Facebook is becoming ‘more and more relevant’ for NZ business.
Business pages have changed in layout, so to mirror more closely the new personal profile pages. Photos show up the top, and viewable information is more customisable.
More importantly, when using Facebook now, rather than having to laboriously visit the several ‘pages’ I look after to check for interaction, I can now change my presence to “use Facebook as Olympic Software” (or either of my other two pages) and voila! A separate set of notifications specifically for the page appear at the top left, to advise me of new fans, and interactions with said page.
This also means that I can now communicate beyond the realms of our wee ‘fan’ page, as “Olympic Software” (on the Microsoft Dynamics Wins page for example) – and alternatively I can communicate as myself, Alex Fauth, on the fan page – a more personal response to a client perhaps. As you can imagine, this opens many new doors of possibility, in how I can portray and spread the message of Olympic across this market leading social network.
So, as you can imagine, I’m excited. Although I do think Mr Zuckerberg could do a few things better yet, with more planned changes said to be in the pipeline, I’m confident my dreams will soon become reality!
The main want, is that while surfing the web, I would like to be able to ‘share’ content as a page – currently I can only share as myself (and only to my personal network). I find this particularly irksome, as personally I share web content far more frequently with page networks, than with my personal network, and currently to do it I have to copy/paste the link as opposed to the sharing function, which is far faster. Anyway, as I say, we live in optimistic hope!
Now, if you’re freshly convinced you need to get your business on Facebook, check out this “Facebook for Business Marketing Hub”, jam-packed with content from our online marketing partner, and industry big-wig, HubSpot, to get some ideas on how to go about it.
My advice firstly, would be to keep an open mind – like all software, Facebook, and how you use it, is a work in progress – don’t be scared of getting it wrong. It is true that once something is online, it’s very hard to retract, but everyone is learning in this ever-evolving game, and even if you do get it wrong – any press is good press!!!!
Secondly, join our Facebook community! I have recently installed the aim of making our Facebook page a means of sharing news, views and resources that will help you ‘extend your business reach’ – and I need all the help I can get to make sure I am in fact doing just that. Go on, join us now.