Facebook for Business | The Digital Clicks Blog
Google’s Adwords Express was an attempt to tap the market of small businesses that had yet to move into the internet marketing world by simplifying the ad-making process. Google+ hasn't been so kind to companies. When brands understandably tried to utilise the service, Google asked them to wait for a brand-orientated version and went so far as to delete corporate accounts, much to the annoyance of businesses using it. With traffic to Google+ beginning to slow down after its opening month, Facebook has released ‘Facebook for Business’ to show smaller-scale marketers that their brands are welcome. Facebook for businesses is an ‘online education centre’, a new page of simple instructional guides to its combined marketing services. It is a step-by-step ‘how-to’ for new brands wishing to use Facebook as part of their SMO strategies. The new instructions serve as indicators of how businesses can utilise fan pages to build and maintain audiences—with the aid of apps—and use ' sponsored stories’ to coerce users into ‘liking’ products and services that their friends have shown an interest in. Perhaps most important to Facebook, though, are the instructions geared towards the use of highly targeted PPC advertising to promote sales and exposure and detail the variety of targeting methods available—an area where Facebook is still at an advantage as a result of 750 million profiles worth of user-submitted information. While none of the services listed are new, 'Facebook for Business' does open up its services to creative advertising agencies who may not know how to optimise their Facebook pages. This is the first time Facebook has been used as an instructional and integrative guide to garner new business. It could demystify the benefits of using Facebook as part of their Internet marketing campaigns. The timing is appropriate considering the integrational potential of Google+’s business profiles with their already heavily utilised list of digital marketing services.