Lucky Tip: Facebook for Business
A basic mistake and surprisingly common. As with many pursuits in Marketing, a strong foundation is essential. Make sure you are using Facebook correctly from the start.
When representing a business on Facebook use a business Page rather than a personal profile.
Why is this important?
Aside from being the correct way of using Facebook you will find many advantages to using a Page for your business rather than a personal profile. See below for just a few reasons why you should be doing this.
You will breach the Facebook user agreement
When you begin using Facebook you will most likely click through the Facebook user agreement but its terms and conditions are important. One such term and condition states that as a business you cannot use a personal profile to promote your products or services. If you do Facebook reserves the right to delete your account!
Adverts cannot be created from a personal profile
As a social media platform Facebook is basically a huge marketing database. The most efficient way to unlock this database is via advertising. On a personal profile, you do not have this facility, you can only broadcast your message to those whom are friends with you on the platform. When you use advertising via a Facebook page your audience is endless and very much targetable.
There are no analytics for personal profiles
Facebook pages have a sophisticated analytics section that allows you as a business owner or marketing director to analyse your published content. These analytics give you access to demographic data, click rates, post reach and much more. On a personal profile, you have none of this data.
Only Facebook pages can schedule content
Over the past year Facebook has really developed its page publishing section. This gives page admins the ability to plan and schedule updates months in advance. You can now also publish videos to other pages you manage and create multimedia posts within the actual page! This is a hugely powerful management tool that you have no access to via a personal profile.
A personal profile has reduced functionality
A person profile is setup for people to connect to people where as a page is there to represent a business. As such on a page you can add a map, embed external apps to increase functionality and now you can even host a shopping cart from your Facebook page.
Summary
Although some choose to use personal profiles to promote their business while others use them by mistake it is important to understand the differences between a profile and a page. As a profit-making entity or organisation, a page offers tools and features that are lacking on a personal profile. Using these tools and features strategically can offer great advantages to your business.
