A few years ago, I found myself working with a number of clients who were Facebook-averse. They simply did not understand why their business should be using Facebook alongside LinkedIn and Twitter (what they considered to be the ‘business’ networks) and certainly didn’t understand why they should invest in Facebook ads.
So I decided to set the record straight and signed up to a Facebook seminar to try and gain some hints to convince them that the vast majority of the customers they are talking to use Facebook and so they should invest time and money into using the social network.
Wonderbly
One of the companies sharing their story about Facebook success was Wonderbly, creator of Lost My Name, a personalised book company that creates a story for children based on the letters of their name. I’d remembered seeing an ad on Facebook by the company the previous Christmas and had bought my nieces a book each as their Christmas present.
Although the company used Facebook ads to significantly enhance its reach and with only a little investment, it achieved a 4x return on investment, making 55% of its sales through the platform. I was amazed that only a few pounds a day could convert into such success!
There were other companies talking about their initial doubts using Facebook as a marketing tool, but after an hour or so of listening to their insights, it became obvious that Facebook at the time, had the ability to completely change a company’s fortunes.
So why use Facebook for marketing?
Although Facebook is getting increasingly less popular for young people that prefer using Snapchat to communicate with their friends, there are still 42.3m UK users of the social network in the UK this year. More than half of those are in key decision-making ages (25-64) according to Statista.
If you tell yourself “but just because the boss of a key client I’m trying to win is on there, doesn’t mean he’ll buy into my company,” you’re wrong. If that one person sees your company presenting itself as a thought leader in the space, even if it’s in his/her downtime, you have the advantage over your competitors. He/she may not interact with that post, but if they see it, it will certainly be in their subconscious, so next time they see a post
It may take time, but it’s just another way of building your brand presence, just with a much larger user base compared to LinkedIn or Twitter. They’re also more engaged than the more “business-focused” social networks and spend longer interacting.
Low cost marketing
If you’re not quite at the point of paying for social ads yet (we’ll be talking more about that in the next few weeks), Facebook can be a very low-cost way of getting your message to the masses.
Whether you decide to take a proactive approach and get involved in conversations with similar business owners in Facebook groups, or just post engaging content on your business page, all it will cost is time. A page is free to set up and you can build your community pretty fast. You can include reviews on your post, contact information and
You can also collect the email addresses of people liking and interacting with your pages and then re-target them with emails too (providing they’ve opted in).
Insights you can get from Facebook are also very impressive considering it’s a free platform. You can see which posts are performing best and which aren’t, making more of those that gain the most traction and dropping those that don’t, offering an always-adapting strategy for your business, time and time again.
