Facebook.

The social platform that consumes our minds and yearns for our constant undying attention. Facebook has come a long way and has put up quite a fight to ward off the competition of new and improved social sites. In fact, Facebook just celebrated its 11th birthday!

In this day-in-age, we like things quick and simple. We’re definitely in a digital era and that shows through our methods of communication. Gone are the times where lengthy phone calls exist and memorizing all your friends and family’s phone numbers was a prideful skill. Billboards are still present – but are they really still the best form of advertisement and promotion? The answer is a simple yet resounding “no”. Come to think of it, we haven’t seen a blimp advertising anything in what feels like years! Time changes things. It’s as simple as that, people.

Facebook has promoted itself to be great for businesses to engage current and future customers and clients. This statement is true, if you know how to work the pros and shimmy around the cons.

Pros

Let’s start with the pros. As mentioned earlier, we people like everything to be simple requiring little to no effort. Facebook has accommodated our wants and therefore it itself is a simply-structured platform. Facebook is very straight-forward and user-friendly. It makes it easy to set up your business’ profile and to search around for people you may know to add to your fan-base.

Its self-explanatory status-posting methods make spreading the word super quick through the user’s ability to add comments, likes and share their favorite posts and videos with the world! Ever heard of the saying, “this video has gone viral”. Ahh, the wonderful possibility with speedy posting!

Having the ability to link your facebook profile to your website is now almost a requirement in today’s world, and Facebook has the ability to make this happen! Remember we mentioned simplicity and efficiency? Well, if your facebook link isn’t directly available on your website or vice versa that may cost you many potential opportunities of business.

You want to provide your followers with value-based content. Making sure your Facebook profile is always churning out new information is an important factor in increasing traffic to your site and makes for loyal followers. If you go to a business’ facebook profile every few days and they continually disappoint due to their lack of interesting content, would you continue to follow them much longer? The chances are, probably not. So, putting out interesting content on a regular basis is a must! Once again, Facebook wins the gold medal by allowing continuous posting on your profile and providing the ability to reach such an enormous audience all at one time.

Cons

And what about the cons? Patience. Patience is a necessary evil when it comes to having a Facebook profile. We all would like to think that the moment our profile goes live we will be flooded with thousands of friend requests. Most of the time, that does not happen. So patience, young grasshopper, for the end result is worth the wait. Facebook is simple, but can sometimes feel similar to a needy newborn. Your profile needs coddling and attention (aka responding to viewers comments, updating posts and continual monitoring). It’s all worth it in the end, we promise.

Staying up-to-date with your community and consistently being aware of how many followers you have is an absolute must. It would seem that counting your “likes” on your profile would be a reliable way to determine the scale of your audience, right? This may not be true. Just because a user “liked” your profile, doesn’t necessarily mean your posts will reach them. I’ll explain; there’s the sneaky little button that allows users to “hide” or “unsubscribe” to your feed. These users are still shown as liking your profile, and your business won’t be notified that they hid/unsubscribed from your feed. That’s why it’s so crucial to provide your users with valuable content to make them stay hooked!

With all this said, the pro’s really outweigh the cons! So, go get yourself a Facebook profile and start promoting your business! Go reach out to your community and enjoy this exploration process, and give many a thanks to the invention of smartphones! – Fun little fact (this may not come as a huge surprise); users who own a smartphone spend much more time checking Facebook – giving your business even more motivation to POST, POST, POST!

Ready to get started? We are too. Let’s get to work!

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