How Can Facebook Be Good for Business - Research Paper Example

This paper will discuss how Facebook can be good for businesses. This will also analyze the scope of marketing activities in this new age of online branding. Facebook provides users with a common platform to express their views and share their opinions easily so as to significantly take part in the social formation process. As compared to traditional promotion techniques, companies obtain a great pool of audience while marketing through the Facebook channel. In other words, firms can cheaply advertise their products and services to people across the globe using Facebook.

In contrast to conventional promotion techniques, Facebook-based promotion assists companies to collect customer feedbacks regarding various product/service instantly. Today all successful companies have a well maintained Facebook page and they keep their pages updated in order to be in good touch with customers. Market analysts point out that Facebook is very helpful for companies in dealing with brand positioning in the current business environment. Modern people spend more time browsing the internet, particularly Facebook rather than watching television.

Therefore, TV ads would be less effective (in terms of cost and productivity) today. The most fascinating advantage of Facebook-based brand positioning is that it significantly benefits businesses to cut down their operating costs while achieving the planned benefits quickly. To illustrate, an organization can very cheaply maintain a Facebook page and develop its followers’ group as there is no extra charge for doing so. According to Schivinski and Dabrowski, with the emergence of Facebook, communication with customers has become an easy task for organizations and this situation, in turn, drives the formation of timely and potential operational strategies.

Undoubtedly, most of the marketing managers will agree that a notable percent of their new business comes from existing customers. In the opinion of Lynn and Davis, mouth publicity is the most powerful tool of advertising because consumers are the ones who can best evaluate a product/service. It is evident that Facebook provides users with extensive exposure to discover and share information and this feature of social media contributes to the feasibility of ‘word of mouth referrals’.

The Guardian reports that “there are more than 3.2 billion likes and comments posted to Facebook every day, many of those to the 37m brand pages”. It directly reflects the unimaginable scope of Facebook-based brand promotion. Since a company’s Facebook page will reflect its business and what it stands for, the management must pay higher attention to creating and maintaining its brand page. To illustrate, the firm may set a cover photo that depicts the essence of its brand and quality of products/services offered.

Firms can include the “find us on Facebook” option on its website, emails, and newsletters in order to encourage its existing customers to like the firm’s brand page. Hence, the company gets a huge group of existing and prospective customers subscribed to its brand page.