How Small Business Can Actually Benefit From Facebook

Of course everyone by now has heard of Facebook. And when small business owners have seen bigger businesses benefiting from Facebook, they’ve of course decided to try it themselves. But there’s a lot of bbad information going around leaving a ton of small business owners with a bad taste in their mouth.

Back in January, i blogged about a chart from emarketer about the 9 main benefits of social media marketing. But let me be clear. That chart applies more often to bigger companies. A lot of the benefits listed aren’t relevant to small businesses because they don’t have enough people “liking” their Facebook page. Because of this, “monitoring what is being said about your company”, “improving customer service”, “resolving problems” and a few others don’t apply.

Now, there’s lots of companies selling $1,000 a month and $500 a month “social media marketing” packages. In my humble opinion, they’re selling snake oil. As of right now, there’s a general consensus in the industry that there’s no evidence suggesting companies are profiting off large social media investments. They’re still working on it and making progress, but we’re not there yet. And most people who will tell you different and that small businesses are making money off of spending thousands of dollars off Facebook, are probably the same people selling these social media services.

At Customwave, we do have a social media marketing package. We keep it simple, provide the basics and do only what we know works for sure. We charge $25 a month for it.

There’s 2 main ways small businesses indisputably benefit off of Facebook. We post regularly on our clients Facebook pages with relevant content. For people who have never heard of your company before and they find your Facebook page, our clients will look like experts and authorities in their industry. This is the type of thing that convinces people to actually go through and do the job with you after they find your phone #.

The second main way Facebook benefits will have to do with how many people “like” your Facebook page. The more, the better. Because once someone “likes” your Facebook page and we post content, the content will land in their “news feed”. It’s very similar to email marketing, except in my opinion better because most people these days spend more time on Facebook than their email. This is how small businesses can generate referrals off Facebook.

These are two sure-fire ways that small businesses benefit from Facebook. Everything else at this point on Facebook is theory and experiment.