The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Note: This post is the first in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, an expert white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

Facebook is more than just another channel where businesses can reach their audience. It represents a fundamental shift in the way marketing is conducted. David Dunne, a longtime executive at Edelman Digital and founder of Velocidi, a next-generation digital marketing agency, explains how brands have moved from ‘pyramid-style’ marketing – a few people distributing messages to the many – to a model with thousands of partici- pants:

“The increasingly digital world we live in has forced B2B and B2C brands to think beyond their traditional marketing – where a few people decide the brand messages their audiences receive - to programs and campaigns that originate with and revolve around the audience’s digital life. Facebook is one of the important aggregators of these audiences. For many brands, there is nowhere else on the Web where you can collect as large of an audience.”

The numbers bear him out: to date, Facebook has more than 800 million active users. (It won’t be long before they reach a billion.) Half of them log on every day. In aggregate, they spend 700 billion minutes per month on the site. Whether you’re a startup or a major brand, a Facebook Page is no longer optional.

Even if you don’t have an official presence on Facebook, thousands of people will still use the network as a forum to discuss your offerings. As Mark Spangler, Director of Client Services at Stuzo explained, “People are on Facebook, and they’re going to talk about you. By owning and claiming your presence, you have the ability to start participating in the conversation.” Or, as Dunne put it, “The question is not whether you should have a Facebook page, but what your Facebook presence should be.”

Of course, maintaining a Facebook Page isn’t simply a defensive strategy. Facebook Pages are a tool that allow you to interact with users at greater scale than ever before. “With a Facebook Page, you can activate a large audience that’s already pulled together,” explained T. J. Kelly, VP/Group Director of Digital at Edelman. “In most cases, it’s easier to get Facebook users to interact with your page than it is to get them to interact with your website.” Some analysts are even suggesting that corporate Facebook pages may begin to replace traditional web-based homepages in coming years.

Facebook Pages are still relatively new, but a number of offerings have surfaced to help businesses manage them effectively. Among the most important of these include Buddy Media, Vitrue, Wildfire, and Involver. In this series, we’ll review their solutions, and others, after discussing some best practices for Facebook Pages.