Facebook is a wonderful community for lead generation and brand promotion. You will need to set up your business the right way to have success on the site.

Top 10 Benefits of a Facebook Business Page

1. Increased Exposure to Potential Customers

1.19 BILLION USERS.

Need I say more?

If your business can’t find new customers on Facebook, maybe you should rethink your line of work.

2. Gather More Leads

Just having people Like your page isn’t enough to provide yourself with a long-term, sustainable business. Sure you can make a good living short-term off just using your Facebook page.

But what if Facebook does actually disappear one day?

If you haven’t made a connection with your followers outside of Facebook, then you’ll be in trouble.

That’s why smart businesses gather leads in the form of email addresses — so they can contact their community outside of Facebook.

Most do this through contests, giveaways and newsletters — and it’s a proven system.

But you also need to be careful how you use your leads.

For example, don’t hammer fans with daily emails peddling affiliate products and other junk — unless that’s what they signed up for.

Email them consistently once or twice a week with helpful information that also leads them to your website — where they hopefully will become customers.

3. Lower Your Marketing Expenses

Starting a Facebook business page costs you exactly $0.

Sure, you may pay a graphic artist to design a profile picture and cover photo — but that’s not a necessity.

Simply using photographs you take of your business will work — and in some cases that’s better than a creative image from a designer.

My point is that getting rolling with a page costs you nothing until you start paying for ads to get page Likes, boosting posts and running Sponsored Stories — all of which you should be doing with your page.

Facebook ads are relatively inexpensive when compared to traditional print, radio or TV ads — and are 1,000x more targeted.

4. Reach a Targeted Audience

This is carry over from #3 — and it’s super important.

Just because there are 1.19 billion Facebook users, it doesn’t mean they all want to Like your page.

In fact, I wouldn’t want all of them to Like my page — because only a small percentage of them would actually engage with my posts.

As shown in my example above, I was able to get inexpensive Likes by targeting my ads.

I targeted people who already had an interest in Bigfoot — almost guaranteeing that many of them will give my page a Like.

Same is true for your page and business.

If you’re a local business, direct your ads to target customers within a 10-15 mile radius. The ads might cost you more, but the Likes and potential customers are laser targeted.

If you run an ad on TV, during say an airing of “Seinfeld,” you’d be hard pressed to know with certainty whether your ad targeted the right kinds of people for your business.

With Facebook ads, you can be certain — if you target the ad correctly.

5. Use Facebook Insights

I’ve admitted countless times that I’m not a numbers guy — I just don’t get my jollies by digging through stats.

But I love on Facebook business pages. the new Facebook Insights provided

Why?

Because they’re easy to understand — even for non-technical people like me. And they provide great information for business owners.

Taking a quick look at the insights of my new Bigfoot page, I see:

• How many page Likes I have
• The Reach of my posts & page (take a look at that Reach & tell me Reach is dead!)
• Engagement of the page
• Post Performance… and more

You can dig around and find out how specific posts are performing, the demographics of your fans, etc.

6. Build Brand Loyalty

Besides being a place to build a customer base and sell products, a Facebook business page can do wonders for helping you build brand loyalty.

What exactly does that mean?

Well, if you consistently provide valuable and entertaining content, your followers will stay loyal — even when you make mistakes.

These days, people look online to find businesses to buy from — and they predominately search social media.

If your followers see you being active & responsive, they’re much more likely to do business with you than a company with no Facebook presence or a poorly run page.

7. Increase Your Web Traffic

Smart Facebook page owners use their pages to drive traffic to their websites.

If all you’re doing on Facebook is getting engagement on your posts, then you’re really just an entertainer — not a marketer.

So start using link posts to drive traffic to your site.

The great thing about link posts is Facebook now generates a full-width thumbnail image if your website makes one available.

Because they draw more attention, these wider images are more likely to get clicked.

This example from Starbucks looks like a photo post, but is actually a link.

Posting links to your website is an essential part of any Facebook content strategy.

The Likes, comments and shares are lower on the link posts — and that’s fine — because our goal is to drive traffic with those posts, not necessarily get engagement on Facebook.

8. Boost SEO

The topic of SEO and Facebook gets debated quite a bit.

Some argue that the information in the About section of a business page is scraped and thus searchable by Google.

It’s hard to accurately verify or dispute this claim.

9. Be Mobile Ready

The vast majority of Facebook users are accessing the site via their mobile devices — many of them only with a mobile device.

As this trend grows — it becomes more and more important for your business to have a presence on Facebook.

The great thing about a Facebook page is Facebook does the heavy lifting for you! — optimizing your page for both desktop and mobile devices.

The exception are the custom apps (tabs) on your page that are seen on the desktop but not on mobile devices (unless you supply the mobile friendly link created by an app provider like ShortStack).

When people view your Facebook page on a mobile device it shows users:

• Hours of operation
• Address
• Reviews
• Phone number to call directly from the Facebook mobile app

10. Spy on Your Competition!

An interesting new feature on Facebook pages lets businesses spy on competitors.

Now this doesn’t mean you can look over their shoulders and check out sales or results from their ads — but it’s a great way to see how others in your area and niche are growing on Facebook.

Why is this useful?

If you look at the Pages to Watch and see a page has exploded and gained lots of new Likes, you can visit that page to see what they’re doing right.

Perhaps a post had huge success and you can copy what they are doing on your page to gain more Likes.

This may not give you a ton of insight, but sometimes just a little motivation can cause you to break bad habits on Facebook and improve your posting and advertising.

After all, no company wants a competitor beating them to Likes!

This infographic from Quill.com offers 13 Facebook page tips you should check out: