4 Reasons to Stick with Facebook

Here are my 4 essential reasons to still invest time in your Facebook page:

You’ve worked so hard

You’ve worked so hard for years to establish a community that you engage with regularly – asking them questions, gathering opinion and having conversations. Why would you just turn that off? That’s priceless. You wouldn’t just throw your customer email database out the window, would you? Turning off your Facebook page would be a worse crime than this, as your fans have actively chosen to interact with you on a personal, two-way level – a marketer’s dream! That doesn’t happen often.

Customer expectation

Your customers and potential customers expect you to be on Facebook full stop; whether they see your updates or not. When they search for your business, they’ll expect you to be there and expect you to be offering value to them in one way or another. Without this, you could run the risk of damaging your brand image. I mean, what sort of businesses don’t have a Facebook presence? – Is what they’ll think.

What about existing fans?

How valued are your fans going to feel if you turn off your page all of a sudden or if you stop interacting with them altogether? Your existing fans matter (a lot), so surely it’s still worth spending the time connecting with them, even if you have to pay to do it effectively. Bringing me nicely onto my next point . . .

Facebook advertising is affordable

When you compare Facebook advertising to other forms of advertising such as print, radio, TV etc. it presents real value for money. Not only this, but Facebook gives you the rare opportunity to be extremely targeted with your advertising.

So even though it seems really unfair that you’re now being forced to pay to connect with your community that you’ve spent years nurturing, we need to remember that it isn’t extortionate and you can run successful campaigns even on minimal budgets.

For example, you can set maximum daily expenditure budgets from as little as £1. At the end of the day Facebook is a business and they have every right to charge for this service – it was just sneaky! We should have seen it coming hey?

So, getting to the point . . .

You simply have to continue with your Facebook efforts (to a certain extent) for all of the reasons mentioned above, and you certainly can’t shut your page down. So what do you do?

It’s all about time management: My advice would be to think very carefully about how much time you’re investing in it, as it's becoming harder and harder to justify. Definitely consider increasing the amount of time you spend on Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest for example as opposed to Facebook, seeing as these channels are becoming more and more attractive to the masses in 2014, particularly Twitter with it’s imminent profile changes that look scarily similar to Facebook.

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