Green Peaks Marketing Services LLC

In 2023 Facebook added 91M users through Q3, and claim that its user base is the largest it has ever been. While all evidence does suggest that user engagement has been in decline, (meaning people don’t like, share, comment as much as they used to) the number of users remains eye-wateringly high. It remains the 3rd most popular website in the world, behind Google and YouTube.

Despite this, some businesses question the need for a Facebook Business Profile since they already have a website. To start with, viewing a Facebook Business Page as the same thing as a website is wrong. It should be seen as just one of the tools to help you establish a digital presence for your business, but not the only, tool.

Certainly, it’s quick to set-up a Facebook Business Profile page – much easier than building a website in fact, but it can’t do everything a website does for your business and you are more limited in what you can put on there.

Why Facebook is Still Relevant for Your Business Marketing

• It’s still the leading social media platform in the world with around 3B users, and 2.1B (~70%) of those use it daily.
• In the US alone, ~70% of the population use Facebook, for an average of 1.5 hours per day.
• It’s an effective advertising tool, well suited to small businesses who want to target at a hyper-local level using the the vast amounts of granular information that Facebook has about its users. This data is collected from their on-site searches, interests, and social circles as well as off-site (off Facebook) activity where the Facebook pixel exists.
• It’s generally a cheaper way to advertise than Google and other advertising platforms. Facebook, along with Instagram (both owned by Meta), has the highest marketing ROI at 29%. This empowers small businesses on a tight budget.
• It presents a FREE way to engage with people and gather insights about your customers. You’ll get demographic and behavioral data about your followers, and you can run surveys and polls to learn more and get the specific answers you’re looking for.
• It can boost your website’s SEO. While it’s not clear if Search Engine algorithms use Social Media to boost website rankings, many studies have shown that having a stronger social media presence with high levels of engagement can help improve your website SEO ranking.
• A healthy and active (meaning both customer AND business activity) social media presence on Facebook will help generate more followers and more traffic to your website – your true digital home. This in turn can boost SEO performance and customer confidence.
• And finally, (at least for this list) it helps make businesses more discoverable. Facebook is a a search engine! Many people looking for a local business (around 56% in fact) will use Facebook to search for companies, brands, along with recommendations and opinions from other Facebook users.

How to Set-up A Facebook Business Profile

While it’s simple to up a Facebook Business Page, it does need some pre-planning and thought to make sure it isn’t weak, and potentially do more harm than good.

To make it an effective tool and to ensure it presents a strong impression of your business you’ll need to have branding in place (e.g. a logo), a clear and concise description of your business, your contact information so potential customers can reach you to learn more (email address, phone number, WhatsApp, and yes, a website ideally!). You’ll need to be ready to invest your time to monitor your page so that you can respond to questions or comments. There’s nothing worse that feeling ignored, and your customers will feel this way if they post a comment and expect a reply only to receive radio silence.

You can refer to Facebook’s own page with steps to set-up a Business Page. Otherwise, here’s is our own video version which we think is a bit more engaging 🙂 This video covers some of the key reasons why Facebook is still important for businesses and should set-up a Facebook Business Page. It includes a walk-through of the steps to help you create your own Business Page in approximately the same time it takes to make a PB&J sandwich and eat it!

Facebook’s Unique Purpose (And, Happy 20th Birthday, Facebook!)

Facebook was born on a Harvard college campus in 2004 – yes, 20 years ago this year!

There can be no argument about the significant impact Facebook has had on the world on many fronts – social, economic, political, and of course business.

While there are many more Social Media platforms on the scene today than there was in 2004 (remember My Space and Friends Reunited?), it’s quite incredible that Facebook continue to lead the on the ‘Number of Active Users’ metric, which is credit to their ongoing innovation. Furthermore, it proves that people continue to value what the platform offers.

Instagram, Twitter, and more lately, Snap Chat and TikTok, all compete for the 1,440 minutes in our daily lives, and while has impacted Facebook’s Average Time of Platform and Engagement rate metrics, it still retains users and continues to add more users each year because of it’s unique purpose.

The platform is so interwoven into the fabric of people’s daily lives – a Marketplace, a news source, a search engine, an entertainment center and still, just as it was at the beginning, a community platform, for people with commonalities such as interests, institutions or location. Facebook’s longevity and deep roots in our lives means that it has earned people’s trust and acceptance. Maybe a good analogy is that it’s like a family member, whereas some of the other’s are more akin to a fling or a less serious friendship – fun to hang out with to pass the time, but not the long term partner material.