It comes as no surprise that almost everyone is on a social media site. A social media presence is necessary for all businesses – from freelancers to large corporations. Today, an online presence is integral to marketing one’s business and getting clientele.
We’ve seen a lot of freelance designers use different social media platforms to promote their work. With many social media sites, picking one can be a ride.
Just because many people use a particular social networking site doesn’t mean it’s perfect for you. Misusing a social media site can be a pain and highly time-consuming.
Social media is a great tool, but knowing which platform to use and how to use it right matters.
“Be Social” will be a mini-series discussing social media sites and how each can help supercharge your business.
This week, we’ll discuss the current top dog of social sites—Facebook.
It’s safe to assume that almost everyone we know is on Facebook. With over a billion users, it is no surprise that using Facebook gives you an edge in networking.
Many of us use Facebook for personal use -to connect with family and friends. Using it as a promotion tool can be hard to swallow, especially for those who don’t use Facebook often.
Using Facebook as a promotional tool can be a chore for some, and others see it as nothing more than procrastination. Of course, these issues are pretty much moot with discipline and proper time management.
The real question here is: How powerful is Facebook?
The Stats
Since this is a design blog, we asked our creative pixies to churn out a cool infographic to illustrate Facebook’s reach and depth further.
Key stats:
• Facebook’s Monthly Active Users went up to 23% from 901 million in March 2012
• The Daily Active Users went up to 26% from the 526 million on average in March 2013
• Local Businesses shot up to a whopping 100% from 8 million in June of 2012
• Facebook earned $1.25 billion during the first quarter of this year (2013) — 43% more than the $872 million in the first quarter of 2012
Valuable Features of Facebook for Business
Now that you guys have seen the stats, let’s talk about current Facebook features that could be useful for design businesses and freelancers:
1. Graph Search – Facebook’s upcoming feature integrates social context in searching by adding several variables that sift and organize profiles of people, pages, and services. This makes it easy to find people who like certain brands or interests. You could check out Lifehacker’s Facebook Graph Search.
2. Groups – Similar to the old Yahoo! groups wherein people with the same interests can create a community, on Facebook, users could post statuses, group messages, and event announcements. This is great for designers since they can join many Facebook groups and make new connections. Moreover, it allows you to create a community to promote your business to a targeted audience or gain more followers.
3. Pages – Pages are like profile pages but with more features. In pages, you can monitor and analyze social media data about your audience’s engagement using Page Insights. More businesses have used Facebook pages to represent their company, identify their market, and share essential or entertaining information. This is a valuable feature for freelancers since you can separate your personal and public accounts. Besides that, freelancers can share their work, important updates works in progress, or blog post updates.
4. Instagram – With its recent acquisition of Instagram, Facebook has finally created a top-notch photo and video-sharing experience.
5. Hashtags – This is also a new feature on Facebook, and much like Twitter and Instagram, the hashtag system helps your posts be easily searchable. Just ensure your hashtags are simple and stay at the minimum because no one likes a post filled with sentence hashtags. On top of that, people will think you are being spammy if you are still not convinced about using hashtags. Why not check out Forbes’s post on why you should seriously consider using hashtags?
PROs and CONs of Facebook for Business
Facebook is not perfect, but it is a great tool to add to your marketing and promotion toolbox. Let’s discuss some pros and cons of using Facebook to market your design business.
PROS
- Almost everyone is on Facebook.
- Because of its vast number of users, using Facebook advertising is an edge.
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Likes, Comments, and Share systems are great engagement tools.
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Facebook has intuitive Landing Pages.
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Effortless maintenance since posting photos, statuses, and links only take a few seconds.
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Posts are more optimized because of Hashtags
CONS
- Facebook is a bit inconsistent due to updates now and then.
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Budget constraints, especially for Facebook ads.
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Page monitoring and engagement can take time and effort.
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People will sometimes perceive your content as spam.
Conclusion
Facebook has the bells and whistles of a marketing and promotional tool. It’s free and easy to maintain unless you purchase the ads service, but that’s a different story we will cover sometime soon.
Facebook’s page insights are one of the best tools in Facebook’s arsenal since it tracks followers and their interactions. The one thing that you should remember about using Facebook is that for it to be effective is that it would need your time to maintain it.
In addition, posted content must be interesting and informative—the time and frequency of posting matters too.
With that in mind, freelance designers who are all too busy might have to consider other social media platforms that are far easier to maintain.
What do you guys think? We’d like to hear what you guys have to say.
Share your thoughts, insights, and feedback in the comments below.
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