With the recent economic recession and the phenomenal advance of technology, businesses are wise to reassess their marketing strategies. Traditional marketing strategies are becoming less effective with the demise of the newspaper industry, and the high cost of media advertising. Online marketing,, and particularly using social media, has become increasingly invaluable for businesses to invest in ,as part of their marketing strategy. For example PepsiCo decided not to advertise at the Super Bowl this year, but rather invest those millions of dollars in social media marketing rather than a short 30 second blast on one day of the year.

Many businesses have been focusing their marketing efforts more towards Facebook in recent months. Here are some reasons why your business should seriously look at marketing through Facebook.

1. Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world.

Facebook now has an estimated 500 million users and is growing everyday. Within six months the average time a user spends on Facebook has increased from 19 minutes to 55 minutes.

How long does visitors stay at your business website?

2. Facebook has significantly penetrated into Canada, the UK, and the USA

By dividing the population of each of these countries with the number of Facebook users in that country we can discover the amount of penetration Facebook has. ( Data from ShinyShiny and Website Monitoring)

Canada has the highest penetration of Facebook with 40% of the population being Facebook users. The UK comes in next at 38% and the US, who of course has the highest population among these three, has 36%. It’s not really surprising that Canada ranks so high because 84.3% of Canadians are connected to Internet.

3. Facebook allows Commercial intent

Under Facebook’s terms and conditions a Facebook fan page can be used for commercial purposes. With 200 million people using Facebook every single day and staying for almost an hour it certainly makes sense for business to have a presence on Facebook and to build connections with the target market. When a business attracts a fan to join its fan page, that business has the ability to communicate directly with that person, build relationship and encourage community. Special offers can be promoted, events, and fans can opt in to your business mailing list all from a Facebook page. There are 1.5 million businesses taking advantage of this opportunity, with 700,000 being local businesses.

4. The average Facebook user joins to Facebook two fan pages a month.

There are other features on the Facebook site that are advantageous to use for business marketing and customer generating purposes.

5.Paid advertising

Businesses can use pay per click advertising on Facebook. The ads appear on the right-hand side of a users Facebook screen. Facebook, because of its user profile system, is able to target advertisements demographically which is very powerful.

6.Facebook Connect

Facebook connect is a program in which enables integration of Facebook with other sites. There are 80,000 other sites that can be connected through Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect means that online users can interact with Facebook without actually visiting the Facebook site.

7. Facebook Fan Box

This feature is enabled through Facebook Connect. By setting up a Facebook fan box, visitors to your website, newsletter, or YouTube can become a fan of your business page without actually visiting Facebook. This has proved to be a very effective way for business to gain more fans via their website, videos, and newsletters.

Facebook may not be the ideal social media site for your business, but because of the large number of users and Facebook’s features it is certainly worthwhile to consider Facebook as part of your marketing strategy. Facebook can be effectively used to  enable a business to keep connected with customers, generate warm leads, build brand exposure, and direct fans into its sales funnel.

Facebook has micro businesses all the way up to Fortune 500 companies using it as a marketing medium. Social media marketing is attractive to business because it is relatively inexpensive in comparison to more traditional forms of marketing, and can access many more prospects.

Is your business taking advantage of social media marketing?

How important is it to your social media efforts? What advice do you have for creating content and managing Facebook fan pages? Please comment below.

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