Why Every Small Business Owner Needs to be on Facebook

I can already hear some of you grumbling. In fact, I guess I’m lucky you’ve even clicked the title of this post.

Maybe you have embraced the Internet age. As technology changed your business, perhaps you were an early adopter of the new stuff. I’ll bet you even know that your business needs a Facebook presence. But I’m talking about you. YOU need to be there.

You don’t have time for Facebook, and if you did, why would you want it? You don’t need to see pictures of everyone’s grandkids or, heaven forbid, grand dogs. You don’t want to play video games. You just don’t understand why anyone outside of high school kids would even mess with it.

So why would I assert that every small business owner, really any business owner of any size, needs to be on Facebook?

Because that’s where your customers are. And they spend a lot of time there. Consider these recent stats:

  •  Facebook has nearly 1.5 billion users.
  • One out of every eight minutes spent on a computer is spent on Facebook.
  • One out of every five minutes spent on a mobile device is spent on Facebook.

As Eugene Schwartz said, “There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use.”

Who is Eugene Schwartz? Well, he’s not a digital marketing guru. In fact, he’s not even still alive. But Schwartz was a marketing genius – one of the greatest advertising copywriters of the 1960s – the “Mad Men” era. And, here’s the rest of what he said:

One hour a day, read. Read everything in the world except your business. Read junk. Very much junk. Read so that anything that interests you will stick in your memory. Just read, just read, just read… There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use.

Schwartz was of course talking about reading newspapers, magazines and books of that era. But I’m guessing he would be spending at least some of his hour a day on Facebook, were he alive in 2013.

He believed you have to understand how your audience thinks in order to communicate your message effectively. Spending time on Facebook is market research.

What’s more, would you believe it influences a customer’s trust in you? A survey by Forbes Magazine earlier this year revealed that 77 percent of consumers said they are more likely to buy from a company if the CEO uses social media. It’s important to note “the CEO” in that sentence – trust is influenced by your presence in social media, not just your company’s.

So, take a deep breath and dive in. Meet your customers where they are – on Facebook. E-mail me if I can help.

About Leigh Caldwell

Leigh M. Caldwell is Director of Social Media and Digital Marketing at Harness TechED. She is a content creator and marketing strategist with two decades of experience in social, online, print and broadcast media. Leigh is a native of West Frankfort, Illinois, and a Southern Illinois University alum.

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