Benefits of a Facebook Business Page Over a Personal Profile
Benefits of a Facebook Business Page Over a Personal Profile
When you think about the phenomenal success of Facebook, it is hard to imagine that it started as a social network connecting some student colleges. Nowadays, it has become the way to organise your life and keep in touch with people all around the world, but it is also widely used by businesses to engage with customers.
When creating an account on Facebook, you have two types of pages to choose from: business pages or personal profiles. Until now, many small- and medium-sized companies have used the latter, unwittingly limiting the reach that a Facebook page can have.
However, Facebook has now decided to clamp down on this practice and delete accounts that use them inappropriately. It’s all good news though, as business pages offer many more features than personal pages do, giving companies invaluable insights into their customer base. Even better, you don’t need to re-create your company’s profile from scratch and you won’t lose any content either as all you will have to do is convert your page.
If you need some convincing, here are the top 8 benefits of Facebook’s business pages over personal profiles.
1) You will look more professional
There is no denying it: using a personal page for your business doesn’t project professionalism.
Even worse, as it is connected to your own information, it will send your customers a message when it is your birthday for example, and your business will even have a gender!
2) Facebook Insights
Imagine that one of the best marketing agencies in the world knocks on your door and offers you mounds of data on your customers: their demographics, related interests, gender, etc... for free. Would you say no? Of course not! Yet, by promoting your business with a personal profile this is exactly what you are doing.
With a business page, on the other hand, you have access to a goldmine of information, so you will never have an excuse not to know who your customers are and what they want.
3) Facebook Tabs and Contests
With a personal profile, you can only use posts to present your company. Switch to a business page and you will get several tabs allowing you to add a video, products pages or a newsletter sign-in option for example.
Then, if you are feeling playful and want to run a contest to generate some attention for your products, guess what? You can’t do it from a personal page. Well you can, but you’ll be violating Facebooks T&Cs.
4) Facebook Offers
Offering a special deal through Facebook is a great way to start a viral response. When someone claims your promotion, their ‘friends’ will see it, extending your audience exponentially.Now, you know what we’re going to say don’t you? If you want to offer a promotion directly to your customers, you can’t do it if you only have a personal page.
5) Facebook ‘Friends’With a personal profile, you can’t have more than 5,000 ‘friends’ which seriously limits potential for growth. You may be thinking that if you’d ever have 5,000 customers, you’d be laughing all the way to the bank, but that would require a 100% conversion rate which is well, impossible.
In reality, an ecommerce’s approximate conversion rate is 3-5% across desktops, smartphones and tablets so, 5,000 ‘friends’ wouldn’t translate into more than 150 to 250 active customers. Depending on the industry you are in, it may be completely satisfactory but if you are in retail, you will be aiming for much higher numbers.
6) Facebook advertising
If you run an SME, you’ll be looking at every dollar you spend, and yes, it hurts to think about parting with your hard-earned cash to get a business page when your personal profile seems to be doing the same job for free. By now, you may be starting to realise that it isn’t quite true though and advertising with Facebook is another benefit of business pages.Their Promoted Posts enable you very precise targeting of customers, and the more relevant you are to someone the higher the chance they will buy from you.
In addition, it actually isn’t that expensive to advertise with Facebook.
7) Native Facebook Scheduling
Setting up a Business Page gives you access to post scheduling. Why does it matter? First of all, it will make your life much easier as you can plan ahead and not have to worry about forgetting to do it.
Then, you know how they say never to go grocery shopping on an empty stomach as you will buy the whole supermarket? Well, you want to do the opposite, that is you want to put yourself at the forefront of your customers’ minds when you are at your most relevant for them.
To stay with the food analogy, offering them a promotion on food around 11am when everyone starts getting hungry will probably influence them more than the same post at 2pm when they are full and trying to overcome their post-lunch slumber!
Also, if some of your customers are in other time zones, scheduling will save you from having to get up at 3am to send your offer at a time that makes sense for your customers.
8) Facebook Places
You can connect you business page to a place. This will be particularly useful to shops and restaurants / cafés, etc... as your opening times will be displayed and customers can ‘check in’ and let their friends know that they are at your store or restaurant. This is a great way to allow your customers to naturally promote your business.
We hope that we have demonstrated some of the benefits of using a business page rather than a personal profile for your company. If you would like to know more about it or our digital marketing services, give us a ring on 09 360 2299 or send us an email at info@thissideup.co.nz. We’d love to hear from you.