In terms of Social Media marketing, Facebook’s strengths lay in being able to engage with your customers and clients, offering great customer service, being able to deal with complaints, and of course get your message out there too.
However Facebook is often overlooked in terms of its business-to-business benefits in favour of Twitter (who announced today that they are to launch brand pages) and of course the business-orientated LinkedIn.
You could argue that’s fair enough, LinkedIn was designed with business in mind, and is also considerably more engaging these days than it was just a year ago.
However, don’t rule Facebook out from a B2B perspective. It has several key benefits but I’ll start with the main one.
Facebook has approximately 30m users – near enough half of the population. So even if your business isn’t on Facebook, or a business that you want to engage with isn’t either, there is a reasonable chance that a business owner or decision-maker is, and by the very nature of how Social Media works, there is an excellent chance that they could come across your business page, and potentially engage with it.
Think about how many businesses you see on Facebook on a daily basis and think about how you respond to compelling content. Even if you don’t engage – the awareness factor is certainly something to take into consideration here…
Facebook has also made it very easy to create business pages, add tabs to these, essentially you can now create a version of your own website within Facebook! As above, Twitter are moving onto this gradually, but LinkedIn’s functionality is still a little way behind this, although has improved greatly.
This article is in no way to the detriment of Twitter or LinkedIn – far from it – if you’re a business in 2011/2012 then you need to be on these platforms.
Just don’t rule out Facebook just because you’re not customer facing or retail – the benefits can be huge, and if you want to know more then why now email me at matt@mattdavismedia.co.uk .
Have a great weekend!