Facebook is a social networking service that lets you connect with friends, co-workers, and others who share similar interests or who have common backgrounds. It has come a long way since it original use as a network for college studies.   What makes Facebook different from other social networks are its extensive privacy controls, its development platform, and its large and quickly growing user base. In fact with over 108 million users worldwide, Facebook has even surpassed email as the most frequently used tool online.  

From a business perspective, companies have been primarily leveraging Facebook for the following activities: 

• Branding - Facebook can be a great resource for generating brand awareness, as it has become popular amongst various age demographics and can be a great interception point for building your relationship with you consumers and prospects.
• Customer Engagement - Using Facebook applications can be a great way for communicating promotions, contest and events. Again it is another interception point that can be leveraged to entice consumer engagement with your brand, your products or your service.
• Drive Web Traffic - Facebook can act as a portal point for driving traffic to your site and other online properties.
• Reputation Management - Facebook can be a useful tool for seeing what users are saying about you and your brand. In addition your Facebook profile can now be indexed in the search results and as a result can provide another favorable listing in the organic search results of the engines.
• New Customer Acquisition - Facebook provides an opportunity to find consumers you may have not otherwise discovered.
• Lead Generation - Similar to the previous point is that Facebook can act as another potential lead gen tool that can be used to qualify leads. Reviewing potential prospects' profiles may help you build a relationship with your prospects and aid in the lead generation qualifying process.
• Client Retention - provides another potential interception point to build the relationship with your consumer.
• Access to the social world and its inherent value - aka the cool factor. You never know who is using Facebook. Consider the following scenario: a potential prospect could be doing research on your brand or organisation and may use Facebook to see if you have a presence there. Then they see that you have a Facebook profile and see a number of positive posts about your brand. This in turn can shape their sphere of influence and could end up being one of many deciding factors as to why the prospect selects you over another vendor. The perception that Facebook is "IN" and the fact that you are using Facebook could help influence their perception of your brand. Having said that, there are still many who are anti-Facebook so it could also affect the perception about your brand. The fact remains is that Facebook continues to gain popularity and it is not going away anytime soon.
• Feedback Mechanism - Using Facebook and the various applications available can help you understand consumer behaviour based on the sharing of content and commentary on the social networking site.
• Build Business Cases - Facebook can provide you with an opportunity to build successful business cases as you target specific vertical markets with specific business objectives.

Read more about social media guidelines and etiquette.

Contact our St Albans office today on 01727 764124 for an initial assessment of your online presence.