Facebook on the surface appears as a social network for friends and family to just hang out. Underneath the surface, and behind the business pages, lies an effective marketing tool that every entrepreneur should utilize. Facebook has an ability to connect real human interactions and networking with real people, along with a high Google Page Rank and Google indexing potential…and, of course, it's free. The cost can be an important factor for the budget strapped solopreneur.
One of the first things you discover when starting a business is marketing and advertising can be costly. They can also absorb a bunch of your time. You need your marketing and advertising to be the most effective for the precious time you have to spend. Facebook gives you effective marketing without the cost. If you have a marketing budget, you can purchase ads and it will increase your reach. However, not everyone starts off with an advertising budget, and many of the free social networks provide an incredible amount of exposure to help with that. This doesn't mean that you won't be spending time though. And you should consider the value of your time versus the cost of outsourcing your social media marketing. An important requirement of social media marketing is you have to be there, posting and creating effective communications with your network.
Another reason to use Facebook in your marketing strategy is Facebook has good google page rank. Google PageRank or GPR as it's more commonly seen online, is the scale, link analysis or algorithm Google uses to assign a numerical rating or measurement to a website. This measurement is on a 1-10 scale, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest rating.
Facebook's GPR is 9/10. To achieve these high rankings is quite difficult as a solopreneur. You might spend your entire lifetime on the Internet, and never see this kind of GPR ranking for your own site. This is ok because, you have a Facebook business page with a GPR of 9/10. With the sheer number of websites on the web (it reached 1 billion in 2014), finding your site may be like finding a needle in a haystack. However, what you post and market on your Facebook Business page has the potential of being indexed by Google. This is when the public does a search, and happens to find you, because Google has placed you on the first page of search results, or even the top of the first page in search results. You can be a newbie and potentially reach millions through Facebook that would be impossible to reach on your new website. Let's not forget the 1.49 billion active users on Facebook itself. When you are posting on Facebook, you're combining your no cost marketing efforts with an unprecedented outreach to the public. What you share with your friends can also be shared with their friends, and so on and so on.
As you can see, Facebook should be a part of every entrepreneurs marketing strategy. However there are best practices and even unwritten rules to make the most of your efforts. If you don't have a budget to get help from a professional, I encourage you to take advantage of the many free resources. Many of these you can find right on Facebook through your friends posts.
Source: Facebook marketing for entrepreneurs
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