Is Facebook Useful for Local Online Marketing?

: Image via Wikipedia

Many people are now using Facebook but I would guess that there aren’t many small business owners that realise how useful it can be for marketing their local business on the internet.

These are some of the statistics on the Facebook website to give you some idea of how popular the site is:

* More than 200 million active users
* More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
* More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
* The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
* Average user has 120 friends on the site
* More than 3.5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
* More than 20 million users update their statuses at least once each day
* More than 4 million users become fans of Pages each day
* About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
* There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through
their mobile devices.

So, what does that mean to local small business owners?

Your potential customers are on Facebook every day. If you can engage with them and offer them useful and interesting information you can build a following and get your business out to your local community.

Even if you only have your personal account set up you can still engage personally with local people by uploading your blog posts, videos, photos and status updates, some of which can relate to your business.

A Facebook ‘Page’ for Your Local Business

But you can also set up a ‘Page’ specifically for your business – look on the bottom left of your profile page – where you can put specific information about your business and attract ‘Fans’, keep in touch with them, promote events, add your blog posts, amongst other things. This also gives you an option to create (paid) targetted ads. As Facebook have lots of demographic information about their users they are able to offer much more targeted online advertising than most other sites.

So, if you haven’t thought about using Facebook to help you to market your local small business maybe you should give it a try. Let us know if you need any help.

If you’re already using it, please comment below and let us know what you think of it and what hints and tips you have for making it work for small business owners.