Week 4 - MBA 6102 - Introduction to Social Media Marketing

 Chapter 3 of Introduction to Search Engine Marketing is all about Facebook Pages. If you’re like me, Facebook is just a website your parents like to use. In reality, Facebook is very useful for businesses. “Most social media marketers consider a presence on Facebook a must-have” (Kelsey, 2017, pg.33). Essentially, the best part of Facebook is that once someone likes your page, your content will continue to pop up in their feed. In my own Google searching in the past, I have noticed for some small businesses, even if they do not have a professional high-quality website, you can almost always find a Facebook page. These pages are often made for causes and non-profit organizations as well. 

The downfall to Facebook Pages, similar to Google, is the fact that they want to make money and they will add plenty of other advertisement around your free Facebook page. Social media in general has heavily increased the amount of paid advertising the users will have to go through in their scrolling. That being said there are plenty of positives to using a Facebook page. One of which is the ability to see how many people have looked at your post. While only a portion of people might actually like the post, as long as people are seeing the post, it helps with company exposure. To gain exposure there is also the option to pay for boosting a post. While having a page is free, if you want your page to flourish it will cost money just like everything these days. The rest of Chapter 3 goes through a step-by-step process of building a Facebook page, which if you plan on doing so you should buy this book. I instead thought I would do a little looking in to some company Facebook pages.

I decided to look at a few small companies from small towns in central Illinois where I grew up. While each had a real website, the second page to pop up was their Facebook page. One example in the picture below is a small restaurant in the tiny town of Monticello, IL. Having a Facebook page allows the company to show where they are located, post photos of their food, and then make posts with news. In the picture you can see they were not offering delivery one day so they posted the news to their Facebook page. Updating a Facebook page is much easier than constantly updating your website anytime there is news. The restaurant also lists certain specials in their post section. In general, a Facebook page is helpful to a customer to find contact information and operating hours for a business which might take more searching on the real website.