Why Facebook fan page is better than your business website
With over 1.32 billion users as of June 2014, 150 billion friendships connected, 2.5 billion contents shared every day and over 200 million accounts created in 2011 alone, Facebook positions itself as the king of online engagement.
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The “Like” and “Share” buttons are the most ubiquitous designed features on the World Wide Web, viewed over 22 billion times daily across more than 7.5 million websites.
There are many other features which make the Facebook Fan Page the best online platform for businesses to connect with their consumers or fans.
Unless you invest huge amounts of money into your business website, you will not have some of the features of a Facebook Fan Page.
10 Ways a fan page is better than your website
There are several reasons why having a Facebook Fan Page is better than your simple business website. Some of them are as follows:
Fan Page is free to create
It does not cost you any money to create a Facebook Fan Page for your business. You can get a great Facebook page address for your business.
Having a Fan Page address (www.facebook.com/MyBusinessName) means you have an online presence which your customers can reach you in real time while on the web.
You can be reached through the email service feature of the Fan Page when people click on the Message button.
You also have so many functionalities and features at your disposal which an ordinary business website does not give you.
A Fan Page gives your business a great web presence for free.
Profiling of business is better
Fan Page allows you to profile your business under so many industry categories and sub-categories so people can find you by those categories.
You make use of the Profile and Cover Image columns to advertise your business by using a picture of your products, logo and other artworks.
You can also add your location, contact and other online addresses as well as your working hours, awards and company profile.
You can set some demographic parameters for your Fan Page so you get people within those parameters to join your page.
These features are expensive to integrate into a business website but you get them for free on Fan Page.
Content management is simpler
You can post different formats of contents to your Facebook Fan Page any time. You can post an image of your products or other artworks, a video or an audio of your adverts or documentaries, or text of a product description on your status.
Any time you want to publish content on your website, you must use the content management system to upload the contents. But it usually does not have a comment form to which your readers can add their voices and opinions.
Engagement is better and higher
When you post any content, your fans can interact with it by commenting on it, sharing or liking it in real time.
You are given notifications whenever there is an activity on your page or posts, which enables you to engage with your fans.
Since social media is conversational, you have a better way of interacting with your consumers every time and any time.
Socialising with growing community
Socialisation is at the heart of social media. Your Fan Page enables you to socialise with your consumers and fans more than your business website.
Through consistent interactions on your fan page you will know more about your consumers or fans.
As you interact with your fans, you will know what connects them within their social networks, their shared interests and what connects them to your business apart from your product offerings.
Marketing and advertising are cheaper
Reaching your community of fans or target is cheaper on Fan Page than on your website. You need to place web advert banners on Display Network (partner websites) of search engines or on selected high traffic local websites to direct them to your website.
But you can reach your target any time since they are already on your page. You will know exactly who interacted with your advert when they like, share or comment on it.
Measuring your online presence is smarter
Though you have Analytics (Webstats) on the Control Panel of your website, you need some insights or use third party solutions (like Google Analytics) to grasp the meaning of the information you are presented with.
One key feature missing from the analytics is the profile of people who interact with your website. You may be given limited information about them. But your fan page delivers more detailed Analytics about your community of fans with Facebook Insights
Search engine optimisation
You need to optimise your website by using keywords, descriptions and contents so you can be found easily by search engines when people look for you.
However, most major search engines now rank and display contents from social media, such as Facebook, because they are user-generated.
Since your Fan Page gets updated with content frequently (unlike your poster website) and receives a lot of traffic from your fans, search engines will rank your fan page higher.
Management is easier and cheaper
You do not need to pay a renewal fee every year to keep your Fan Page or the growing number of fans or consumers. You can manage your fan page if you created the page or are made an administrator of the page.
You can post easily on your page, schedule the posts (contents) for later display by Facebook, create events, send emails instantly, interact with individual fans easily and measure the page activities (or effectiveness) using the simple, user-friendly interface of Facebook Insights feature of your fan page.