Why Your Business Should Be on Facebook

The fact that something is popular doesn't mean your business has to useit. However, Facebook is moving from "popular" to "ubiquitous"; depending on where your business is and who your customers are, Facebook is part of daily life for many, or even the majority, of your customers.

There's also a competitive element to this. Eventually, most businesses are going to be on Facebook. In general, the longer you wait to get on Facebook, the more "out of it" your business will seem to heavy Facebook users. And if your competitors make a showing on Facebook before you do, they'll get the early "buzz" among Facebook users and gain momentum that you'll be hard pressed to catch up with.

Consider a local bookstore. Every local bookstore competes with Amazon.com, and Amazon has more than 500,000 Facebook fans at this point (that is, people who've clicked the Like button on Amazon's Facebook Page, as shown in Figure 1.3).

FIGURE 1.3 Amazon has a huge reach on Facebook, but you can beat them locally.

Half a million is a huge number of people, but it's only one out of 1,000 Facebook users in the area that Amazon serves - most of the world. To match Amazon's penetration of its target market, a local bookstore just has to get one out of 1,000 Facebook users in the area it serves.

The area I live in, the Rockridge area of Oakland, has about 20,000 people. So getting just 20 Facebook fans would be a good start for a local bookstore - and might just beat Amazon within that neighborhood. The first local bookstore to "beat Amazon" in this way would get strong momentum with local Facebook users and might go on to get hundreds of Facebook fans. Among local bookstores, they'll be known as "the one on Facebook." Bookstores that try the same thing later will probably find it harder to get traction.

NOTE:

Start Your Website with a Facebook Page What if you don't have a website yet? To start out, you probably should. The Web as a whole has many more users than Facebook, and not being on the Web makes it hard for some of your customers to consider you fully. So should you drop this book and go create a website? Not at all. Creating a Facebook fan page for your business, or even a Places page, is easier than creating a standalone web page. So start on Facebook first and then create a website, using what you learn on Facebook. You'll save time and money.

In fact, Facebook might be more valuable to a local bookstore than it is to Amazon. That's because a local bookstore can take advantage of its local knowledge. Amazon's fan page has to be somewhat generic, addressing the whole world. A local bookstore can use its knowledge of local concerns, local issues, and local events to reach its customers and their Facebook friends.

This ties into two advantages of Facebook: hypertargeting, and connections to social networks. You can target your Facebook presence to reach very specific audiences. And you can reach into people's networks of friends, family members, and co-workers. Once you get a couple of key influencers in a group of friends to, say, come to an event that you're sponsoring, the rest may well follow.

Here's a brief, targeted list of the key reasons you and your business should be on Facebook:

• To reach people. Your Facebook fan page can reach many of your customers, particularly those 30 and under. Simply having them see your business on Facebook will help you stay connected with them.
• To make money. You can use Facebook Places and Deals to actually bring people into your physical location, call you, order online - however you do business. It's easy to measure the results of these efforts and to justify just the effort you put in.
• To not be left out. Every time someone looks for your business on Facebook and can't find it, that's a negative for you. If they then look for a competitor and do find them instead, it's a bigger negative for you.
• For positive "buzz." Just the fact that people know you're on Facebook is a positive, even if they're not fans (that is, they haven't "Liked" your fan page). There's so much positive momentum around Facebook in the press and among ordinary people that simply associating yourself with Facebook is a plus. If you can get your Facebook presence mentioned in online comments and even the print press, as many businesses have, all the better.

A word of caution, though - some of this impact can be measured, but not all of it can. Just as you probably don't have precise numbers for how many people know about your business or what people think of it, you

won't be able to precisely measure all of the impact of being (or not being) on Facebook.

However, because Facebook has gotten so big, it's an easy call - you need to join in! Then you can use measurable efforts such as Facebook Deals to help determine just how hard you work at developing and using your Facebook presence.