Facebook means business

by Gale Martin, Director of Marketing and Member Relations at the S. Dale High Center for Family Business

Today I read an interesting blog post at Inkling Media called, "But My Customers Aren't on Facebook."

The article was so titled because many in the small business world (and that might also pertain to the family business world) aren't on Facebook and thereby assume their customers aren't there either. Essentially, the author made the argument that yes, your customers most likely are on Facebook by examining numbers alone:

The U.S. currently has a population of about 310 million. Of those, about 60 million are under the age of 13 (the age at which you are legally permitted to join Facebook). That means there are 250-million Americans are technically able to be on Facebook. Now consider that nearly 132 million Americans ARE on Facebook.

In other words, more than half the available population in the U.S. is on Facebook.

Still, the disconnect that "customers aren't on Facebook" continues. For how long? In the case of Facebook and many social media, numbers speak louder than words. Facebook users are estimated at 500 million. How much larger does it have to grow before businesses acknowledge that yes, their customers are hanging out on Facebook?

If you are a retailer targeted a geographic customer base, Facebook even has a nifty way of identifying how many Facebook users within a 10, 25, or 50 mile radius are interested in your product. This customer engine is free to use and is found on the Advertise on Facebook page. Though the engine is used to create an ad, you don't need to follow-through and purchase Facebook ads to use it.

Here's an example. Let's say you are a family-owned business that does home remodeling located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Using Facebook's ad engine, you can enter some data and quickly calculate the the number of Facebook users within 50 miles who are interested in Home Renovations, Remodeling My Home, Home Design and Home Building.

In this case, there were 100 potential new customers talking about home remodeling on Facebook, who live within your service area. How many more remodeling jobs would make your year a profitable one? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? How many potential customers could you be cultivating through a Facebook presence or Facebook ads?

Like Twitter, it costs absolutely nothing to open an account and have a presence on either of those social media.

In part two of "Facebook means business," we'll look more closely at Facebook ads and how to use them.