Watermelon Media

Is Facebook a waste of time for small business?

A lot has been written about Facebook as an online marketing tool. While many business owners remain sceptical, due to a lack of measurable return on investment (ROI), it’s difficult to dismiss the potential exposure that an 800 million-strong social network can offer a small business.

By this stage, the theoretical appeal of it should be all-too-familiar. The concept of positioning your business in a heavily used and highly personalised online space is obviously an attractive one.

Regardless, the basis for the scepticism makes sense. Exactly how much time and effort should be spent maintaining a Facebook page appears to be open to conjecture, and the idea that you’re not meant to simply plug your products is understandably counter-intuitive to many business owners.

Samantha Amjadali, digital content manager at Easy Weddings, believes that naysayers will see the benefits if they’re willing to suspend their disbelief and at least invest a small amount of time investigating the platform.

“It’s actually quite a privilege to be allowed onto someone’s private Facebook page,” she says. “By liking business pages, these people are saying ‘I will allow you into my private space that I share with family and friends, and I will allow you to sell to and share your message with me’. That is a huge privilege. Rather than abusing that with constant plugs for products and things, if you add value, they will stay.”

Write a content plan

The notion of ‘creating value’ is something that you’ll read a lot about when researching ‘Facebook strategy’; but what does ‘value’ actually mean in this context?

“People think that social media strategy is about whacking up a Facebook post or regularly tweeting, but it’s a little bit of an art,” says Amjadali. “It’s about building community, and engaging that community.”

Customers are already inclined to view your business as an authority of sorts within its industry. All you have to do is consolidate that suspicion by providing them with content that’s relevant to both your products and their interests. Facebook is a useful tool for doing this. The first step to making use of it is to identify what the purpose of your page is going to be.

Read the full article, by Luke Telford, which originally appeared on nett.com.au (October, 2011)

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