With over 27 million active members, 100,000 new members coming online every day, and over 40 billion monthly page views, Facebook has become the world’s largest social networking website and all signs point to its domination continuing.
The big question for entrepreneurs is: can Facebook help grow my business?
One of my readers put me on to this article from the Globe and Mail which discussed how a Toronto based entrepreneur was able to bring in an additional $3,200 in revenue for her fitness classes by using Facebook.
“I love it,” said Ms. Clapp, whose ad has been viewed about 127 times. “I’m completely fascinated with how I can create an online business without any overhead at all.”
The article and the suggestion from my reader was enough to push me over the edge – I decided to sign up for Facebook as a test to see how much it can actually help grow your business.
I posted a note on my profile asking how business owners could benefit from using Facebook. One response that I received from a friend, Jeremy, was:
I’m still a bit of a Facebook rookie (I’ve had a profile for two weeks). From what I can tell so far though, it is first and foremost a social networking site.
The best thing that I’ve taken away from Facebook so far is reconnecting with dozens of people I haven’t talked to in years (some as far back as grade 2). Seeing what friends from previous eras in my life are up to, makes the time I spend on the site totally worthwhile. From that I’ve had lots of people ask about my business and my clients who I’ve listed in my profile. I can’t say that it’s lead to any business for either of them yet–but we can all recognize the long term benefit of exposure to a warm audience.
I think that the Facebook culture looks down members who use their profile for purely commercial purposes–it’s like trolling a relationship website for a one night stand.
Is Jeremy correct? Over the coming weeks, I will update how my progress is coming along. In the meantime I would love to hear your success stories or tap into any resources you have come across on how to promote a business using Facebook.
Evan Carmichael
What Jeremy describes is exactly what my experience has been with Facebook. It’s really fun, and definitely a lot more active than LinkedIn (which is deathly boring), but I’m not sure it’s a place for doing business. I’ve been on Facebook for about a month now, and while I’ve regained contact with friends and family all over the world, nothing business-related has come out of it.
I’m afraid Jeremy might be right. I was an avid Facebook user before I ever considered it for commercial purposes, and I’ll testify to the fact that it’s just a whole different level above MySpace in terms of fostering any sort of real social interaction. Facebook doesn’t offer the customization and personalization options that MySpace does, but that doesn’t prevent it from FEELING more personal.
Maybe it’s the lack of spam (or awful layouts), but Facebook isn’t the sort of community where you can really do a whole lot for your business. I tried it, and although people joined my group, ultimately nothing resulted from it, and my boss and I decided to let the idea go, however promising it seemed. I believe the only way one can successfully use Facebook to market their business is through an application, and even then, this has limited possibilities and really only works well for certain niche markets.
Thanks for the comments.
Anthony, what did you try to do to promote your business? Are there any lessons learned on what did not work and what sort of worked?
Evan Carmichael
I think the biggest problem with Facebook marketing was that its niche did not align with my ideal customers.
I work for an e-commerce firm that primarily sells furniture. I made a Facebook group, and many of my friends joined it, but nobody really clicked the links, took advantage of the promotions, or even cared. Then again, most college students couldn’t give a damn about furniture.
My office is split with another company, who operates a few websites among which is a headphone and speaker review site. This clearly is more appealing to the younger Facebook audience, and so they saw some success with getting people to sign up for their e-mail marketing program (they offered a free drawing for $250 headphones, I believe). The success was still rather limited.