This is a guest post from Jay Buerck
Plenty of companies have fan pages on Facebook. However, many of them treat it as a marketing afterthought, something that needed to be done because “everyone else was doing it.” They must not be paying attention to the growing popularity of Facebook fan page creation services. The majority of these services cost money, yet their rapid success means multiple businesses must be paying these providers to help them improve their fan pages.
For small businesses with limited marketing capital, do the available funds go to bettering the company website through SEO or improving the Facebook fan page via SMO? The gut instinct is to skip Facebook in favor of improving the website proper. Yet by creating a more enticing Facebook fan page, you could actually be taking care of both at once.
But pay for Facebook business page optimization? Seriously?
Go ahead and create your own Facebook business page. It’s certainly not hard to do so. Yet when you’re finished, start looking around at the business pages of other companies, especially competitors. If they’ve utilized fan page creation services, then their pages are sure to blow yours out of the water.
At the center: tabs and apps. Currently, Facebook doesn’t let just anyone throw any app onto a fan page. Instead, they allow several chosen companies to provide extra profile perks to people for a fee. In order to have a stylized fan page, you’ll have to utilize one of these services.
So how does all this glitz and glam help your business and boost traffic to your website?
Look at Facebook as a mini-Google. Your fan page is your website. The hundreds of millions of members of Facebook represent the hundreds of millions of bits of competing web content. Your fan page’s popularity is determined by how much it stands out from the rest.
Now, think about the fact that Facebook directs more online traffic these days than Google. What that means is that more people are on Facebook than they are anywhere else, which includes your website, but basically entails the web in general. Therefore, more of your potential customers are likely to encounter your fan page than your actual website.
And guess what gets to be put onto your fan page with or without the added bonuses of apps for your tabs? Your company’s URL. You’ll improve the traffic to your website with a valuable backlink by strengthening your business’s Facebook page.
Your presence on Facebook is more likely to get attention than your presence on the general web. With that in mind, your fan page is more important than your website. One can definitely improve the other. The same cannot be said the other way around.
(Facebook page creation services can be free for one-time use for one personal profile or they can cost $100/month. The majority, however, fall far closer to the free-end, with most basic entrepreneur-packages costing around $20/month.)
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