Facebook is a powerful part of any social media marketing strategy: a few months ago the site broke the 1 billion mark for monthly active users. Whatever your business, wherever you’re located, your target market is on Facebook.
There’s a difference, though, between being on Facebook and making effective use of the social network’s marketing power. Effective use requires planning, and that means before you set up an account or page—in fact, account creation is the first place many business owners go wrong. Many make the mistake of setting up accounts for their businesses rather than pages.
Some just don’t understand the options. Some made a conscious choice to go with an account rather than a page because in the olden days of Facebook (a couple of years ago), pages (then called Fan Pages) were very limited. Times have changed, and creating a page for your business is the far better route to incorporating Facebook into your social media marketing strategy. You can post photos and videos just like you could from an individual account, and comment on other pages as your page.
Already set up as an individual account? No problem. Simply click on this link while you’re logged in and you’ll be offered the opportunity to migrate the account to a business page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate
Here are just a few of the reasons it’s to your advantage to create a business page rather than trying to force your business information into the framework of an individual Facebook account:
There’s No Limit on the Number of People Who Can Like Your Page: When you set up an individual account on Facebook, you’re limited to 5,000 friends. Of course, most individual humans never get near that limit, but that’s not true for businesses—the more people who “like” your business page, the more exposure you’ll receive.
Pages Integrate with Facebook Advertising: Pages offer you the opportunity to promote the page or individual posts through targeted Facebook ads and sponsored stories. Whether you’re looking to draw more followers or you want to promote a special offer or event, Facebook ads are an easy and affordable way to get the word out—but you won’t have those same options with an individual account.
Pages Allow for Multiple Administrators: When you set up a page for your business, you can designate multiple administrators. This allows business owners, managers and marketing staff access to edit the page, post updates and share photos and videos—all while logged in as themselves. To provide the same access to an individual account, each user would have to log out of his or her personal account and sign in to the business account using a shared set of credentials.
Pages are Customizable: Ready to really invest in your Facebook marketing? You can create special offers for your Facebook fans, choose the tab visitors to your page land on, even show different content to those who have already liked your page than to new visitors. Even if you’re not ready to put these features to work yet, why limit yourself?
Making the most of social media marketing means educating yourself about each social network—its users, its features and which options are most useful as a part of your overall marketing strategy. Before taking what may look like the easy route and setting up a Facebook account, make sure you understand what pages have to offer.
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