You walk into party and all your friends are there chatting. Half way through a conversation you start telling everyone about your products and what you're promoting at the moment. One or two people around you might be interested, while the others raise an eyebrow and head to the kitchen for a drink. Ouch, a bit awkward.

Try this scenario on for size instead: You set up a stand with all your beautiful products at a tradeshow in your industry, and it's actually free for you to promote yourself there (amazing!) . You put up signage to let people walking past know your current specials, and you might even hand out some free samples to those who join your mailing list. People walk past and are inspired, afterall you are in a space where your target market is hanging out in. They are there because they are interested in what you are selling, so cool! If you're friendly and your stand looks good, they'll stop and chat with you and maybe even send their friends over.

The difference between these two stories is why we need a Facebook Business page verses posting on our personal profiles. If you're not convinced, then let's look at it this way:

Who sees your Facebook posts?

People can argue that it's getting harder for your Fans to see your business Facebook posts, but they forget that not every friend sees your Facebook posts anyway.  Remember too that unless you're adding Facebook friends every day (unlikely) then the number of people seeing your business posts on your personal profile, will stay pretty much the same or even decline. Because yes, ongoing business posts to your personal page can annoy friends enough for them to ‘unfollow' you (they won't see your posts but still stay ‘friends'). Not to mention the risk of Facebook shutting down your personal page due to business activity which then takes weeks to reinstate.

Do you really need a Facebook Business Page?

So should you promote your business on Facebook at all? Unless you're Coke a Cola, the answer will probably be yes. If you're reading this blog then you're probably a female entrepreneur who is selling either a product or a service, and so the answer will again will probably be yes.

Marketing Benefits of Having a Business Facebook Page

Build Brand Awareness. Posting on Facebook daily allows you to show off your ‘voice' and personality to your customers and potential clients. People like to shop from those who they ‘know' and trust, and having that daily communication allows you to show people what you're all about and create a relationship with them.

Insight into what fans like to see. A cool tool in Facebook Business Pages is your ‘insights', within your insights you'll be able to tell at a glance what sort of posts and topics your Facebook fans like to see. Taking note of these trends will make it easier for you to build more content not only on your Facebook page but also on your website.

Create special offers for your Facebook Fans. Want to offer a super quick promotion or special to reward your followers? It's so much quicker on Facebook and the benefit is that you're likely to pick up a few extra fans along the way.

Over 1 Billion Daily Active Users. Enough said! More than any of us will ever get on our websites by ourselves.

Increase your website traffic. Leverage Facebook's popularity by finding interested prospects on Facebook and then move them to your mailing list. Growing your mailing list should always be your priority.

Humanise your business. There's only so much that potential customers can get to know about us from our websites, whereas with Facebook we can show more of our personalities. Connecting with clients on Facebook is also a great way to open up communication by being able to connect by replying to comments and answering questions quickly.

Be in front of your customers every day. Face it, while building a Facebook page takes consistent work, it's still a heck of a lot faster to create a Facebook post each day (even faster if you batch process or automate) than it does to create a blog post.

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