I coach a lot of business owners on internet marketing strategies, and many have asked me about "Facebook Business Pages" and whether they should create one for their business or promote the one they've already got. For the record, I do not recommend you spend any significant time right now on Facebook Business Pages. Here's why:
The whole idea behind internet marketing is that you can find people who are interested in what you offer and sell something to them. If someone is not ready to buy right then and there, you want to get their permission to keep in touch with them so that when they are ready to buy they'll buy from you.
This is why email marketing has been the mainstay of any successful business online--it's a cost-effective and easy way to keep in touch with a lot of people.
The Dead Sea of internet marketing
The Dead Sea is called "dead" because water flows into it but does not flow out. The water just kind of accumulates and stagnates and eventually evaporates. Right now, a Facebook Business Page is a lot like that.
When someone comes to your business page, and they click the "Like" button, that's where your interaction with them ends. Once they leave your business page, there's no good way to get in touch with them again.
You can't send them a message (like you could if you were a Facebook Group owner) and you can't post something on their walls.
It's like having a large email list that you can't send email to. Your fans just accumulate and sit there.
Don't business posts go to fan's News Feed?
Your business posts are supposedly going to show up on your fan's news feeds. That would be GREAT--if it ever actually ever happened.
But in my long history of surfing Facebook I've only once (1 time) seen a business post make it to my "Top News" feed. It had received quite a few comments before it had become important enough to make it on to my news feed.
So every other post of every business page I've ever been a fan of has never gotten that "critical mass" of comments to make it newsworthy.
That's not encouraging.So like the tree that falls in the forest, the question is "If you post something on your business page and nobody's there to see it, does it make a noise?"
And the answer is "not enough noise to actually help your business".
The future of FB Business Pages
I am sure things will get better. I'm hoping in the future that if you post something on your business page wall it will show up on your fan's news feeds as readily as their regular friend's posts do. It's so easy to "unlike" a business page that any business that abused this power would lose fans quickly.
I would hope Facebook would give businesses the ability to send messages directly to their fans.
I would hope Facebook will create a message autoresponder of of some kind (this is what makes email marketing so great--see "(email tutorial)" if you're not sure what autoresponders are).
Final analysis...
The Facebook people are very smart and I'm sure they've thought of these things. I assume that these things will happen eventually.
So maybe this means you should start and promote a Facebook Business Page based on the future possibility that Facebook will get it right?
At this time I wouldn't recommend it. It might take months or it might take years for Facebook to implement these things, if they do at all.
I hope this has been useful. You see, my job in internet marketing is to go out and study up on this kind of thing so you don't have to. You've probably got a lot of internet marketing questions I can answer for you.
Learn more about my Daily Coaching Call where I make myself available every day so you can ask me questions like this any time they pop up, so you don't have to waste hours of your time on things that won't benefit your business.
Facebook Business Pages will not give you a return on your efforts at this time. There are other Facebook strategies I recommend that will give you a much better ROI for your business.
Yours in success,
-Jarom Adair
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