Using Facebook for Business

Is Facebook Still Popular?

Learn More about Using Facebook for Business
A few years ago, you couldn’t open a business magazine without running into an article written by a business expert who told you that Facebook and Twitter or spectacular ways to get in touch with your customer base.

These marketing "gurus" would tell you that if you didn't have a great plan to do with using Facebook for business, you were going to be left behind. And yet, it would appear that few among America's biggest corporations have been taking this advice. Go to their Facebook pages or their corporate blogs and it's obviously been a while since anyone's bothered to update anything.

How does this affect your business?
That using Facebook for business is no longer a good idea? Is that why only one in four large corporations has any involvement in these or even pay attention to the ones they already have?

The study, if you are interested in it, was done by the University of Massachusetts at their Center for Marketing Research. What they have found out is that the idea of using Facebook for business, while it may be beginning to become unpopular with big businesses (the Fortune 500 and so on), is still quite the a hit with small businesses.

The larger business model
This is not to be taken to mean that large businesses just don't care about Facebook and Twitter altogether though; about two out of three large corporations still do use it. But they don't do so in a regular fashion, and there don't appear to be many new companies jumping on board the social networking bandwagon.

So why are large companies doing this? If using Facebook for a small business is good enough for these niche companies, why should it be any different for large businesses? Well, it could just come down to the generation gap. The larger businesses, built decades ago, were formed to a different kind of internal philosophy. It's like you can't get an older person to really be interested in Facebook the way a 20-year-old might be.

Need to know basis
Large corporations are just extremely protective of their position in the world. They're afraid of participating and somehow losing their edge or losing their mystique. What might happen, they feel, if they were to just go and directly engage with their customers in a way that that competitors could see and they somehow learned too much? That's the thinking there.

Of course, this is totally incorrect. What they fail to realize is that people are going to be thinking things about them whether they like it or not. If they go and participate directly, they'll have a chance of appearing humble and approachable.

It's like a person not defending themselves, Facebook opens the door to open thought, trust and sometimes more sales - therefore making it a vital part of Internet marketing strategies to those business who embrace it.