Facebook Business Page: Why now is NOT the right time to start one
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I hold a daily Coaching Call where business owners ask me internet marketing questions, and the topic of “Facebook Business Pages” has come up repeatedly.
For the record, I do not recommend you spend any significant time right now building up a list of people who like your business page. Here’s why:
The whole idea…
The whole idea behind internet marketing is that you can find people who are interested in what you offer and sell something to them. If someone is not ready to buy right then and there, you want to get their permission to keep in touch with them so that when they are ready to buy they’ll buy from you.This is why email marketing has been the mainstay of any successful business online–it’s a cost-effective and easy way to keep in touch with a lot of people.
The Dead Sea of internet marketing
The Dead Sea is called “dead” because water flows into it but does not flow out. The water just kind of accumulates and stagnates and eventually evaporates. Right now, a Facebook Business Page is a lot like that.When someone comes to your business page, and they click the “Like” button, that’s about where the interaction ends. Once they leave your business page, there’s no good way to get in touch with them again.
You can’t send them a message (like you could if you were a Facebook Group owner) and you can’t post something on their walls.
It’s like having a large email list that you can’t send email to. Your fans just accumulate and sit there.
The News Feed
Your posts are supposedly going to show up on your fan’s news feeds. That would be GREAT–if it ever actually ever happened. But in my long history of surfing Facebook I’ve only once (1 time) seen a business post make it to my “Top News” feed. It had received 16 comments before it had become important enough to make it on to my news feed.“If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s around to hear it…”
So unless a bunch of people happen to visit your business page and all decide to comment on your most recent wall post, then your message isn’t going to get out to your fans. So the question is “If you post something on your business page and nobody’s there to see it, does it make a noise?”
And the answer is “not enough noise to actually help your business”.
The future of FB Business Pages
I am sure things will get better. I’m hoping that if a business posts something on their wall it will show up on your fan’s news feeds as readily as regular friend’s post does. It’s so easy to “unlike” a business page that any business that abused this power would lose fans quickly.I would hope Facebook would give businesses the ability to send messages directly to their fans.
I would hope Facebook will create a direct message autoresponder of of some kind (this comes standard with most email services–see “Email Lists Basics: Email Marketing that Pays” if you’re not sure what I”m talking about).
Final analysis…
The Facebook people are very smart and I’m sure they’ve thought of these things. I assume that these things will happen eventually, so maybe you want to start and promote a Facebook Business Page based on the future possibility that Facebook get’s it right.But it might take months or it might take years, and business owners should focus on the things that will make them money today.
Facebook Business Pages will not give you a return on your efforts at this time. There are many other things I would recommend you focus on that would give you a much better ROI.