Let's face it, if you are new to the web and just starting out with a fresh new website to increase your market audience. It does not matter how popular you or your brand is locally or how loyal your brick and mortar customers are. It is going to be like starting over from the very beginning trying to get your brand to be trusted with a new audience.
Social media is HUGE and according to the latest polls it accounts for anything between 35% and 45% of sales generated online. Facebook generates a mind blowing 770 billion page views per month and although those figures do not count for your market, they can still tell us that there is a massive market there that every savvy web marketeer should tap into!
To break this down to more manageable figures that we can use to see where the value is to us. Lets see some averages that will give us a generalized report.
- The average user has 130 friends
- The average user sends 8 friend requests per month
- The average user spends and average of 15 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook each month
- The average user visits the site 40 times each month
- The average user spends 23 minutes each visit
- The avearge user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
- The average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
- 200 million peopl access Facebook via a mobile device each day
- More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared each day
- Mobile Facebook users are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users
Source: facebook.com, pingdom.com
Now lets take a quick look at what we can do to tap into this market and answer the all important questions "Why Would I want to?" and "How much is this going to cost me?".
Why would I want to create a Facebook page?
This is an amazing opportunity to reach out and be seen by more people that would ever walk into your store in a lifetime and friend or family members recommendation is much more likely to impact someones choices than any other form of advertisement you would sink your money into. Making social media interaction your number one target to reach out to.
How much is this going to cost me?
The bottom line is that it is FREE to use and to build your pages. Now admittedly the average person does not posses the skill set required to do this beyond setting up an account, inviting those that you know to join you or writing to your Facebook page. So unless you know how to maximize the full potential of Facebook you are going to have some out of pocket expense to have a professional set up your Facebook page and connect it with the developer tools to your website. Compared to the cost of traditional advertising it is a small price to pay for the strong potential ROI that you will gain in the long run.
In part two of this blog post I will give you more details on how to get started building your Facebook pages, amass fans, manage comments and best practice methods to help your fan base grow. All to help you with your bottom line and to give your customers more satisfaction with your products or services and give you a stronger view about how your products or services are being used and viewed by your customers.