Facebook Page vs. Facebook Ad: What is Better for Marketing Business on Facebook?

No matter what their products or services are, business persons deal with a simple fact every day ... doing business is a people business. Companies, big or small, exist because people buy their goods or services. There is no business to talk about when there are no people buying it.

In order to succeed, a business enterprise must not only connect to a big crowd of people; it must also establish a strong following of satisfied and loyal customers. For business to grow, an entrepreneur must grow his customer base. In the past, entrepreneurs distribute letters, flyers and business cards to generate customers for their business. Today, however, business is increasingly connecting with people through the internet. And since we are talking about people, where else it is better to start marketing your business online but on Facebook?

Yes, Facebook has the people ... 400 million users and growing! According to Facebook’s Press Room, there are 200 million active users logging on to Facebook every day, with each user having an average of 130 friends and connected to an average of 80 community pages, groups and events. Every month, users spend over 700 billion minutes on Facebook.

Facebook provides great avenues to market business online. Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era”, says Facebook is “increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services”. “You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are”, adds Ms. Shih, a founder of Hearsay Labs, a software marketing company that specializes on Facebook.

Two of the popular marketing platforms on the Facebook are the Facebook Page and the Facebook Ad. Both are easy to set up and offer boundless yet cost-effective opportunities to market business online. Let’s try to look at the these marketing platforms, compare their pros and cons, and find out how entrepreneurs, especially the small ones, can use each or both of them to promote their business online.

To begin with, there is no doubt Facebook Page and Facebook Ad are good channels for online business marketing. These tools share a common strength—that is the opportunity to market your business to Facebook’s growing number of active users who could be potential customers for your business. However, each has its own unique marketing features, as well as strengths and weaknesses.

Gaining Online Presence with Facebook Page

The Facebook Page may be considered as the basic section for businesses seeking online presence through Facebook. Entrepreneurs who wish to start promoting their business through Facebook should create a Facebook Page as a starting point.

The Facebook Page operates as a fan page where businesses connect to millions of Facebook users and disseminate information about their products and services by drawing leverage on the boundless network of connections between friends on Facebook.

There are many ways to optimize the dynamic and interactive Facebook Page. Business can actively engage with their fans through the wall page, where they can post marketing campaigns, product photos, promotional videos, company press releases, and other useful product information. They can also respond to customer questions and even complaints as the wall allows social interaction. Every post made on a Facebook Page will appear in News Feeds that will reach all Facebook users who have subscribed as fans to the page.

While the Facebook Page is set to the wall as a default visitor landing page, you can tweak with a simple HTML code to set up a more creative welcome page where you can greet visitors with a variety of multi-media welcome greetings, host contests or product giveaways. 

Optimizing with Facebook Ad

Facebook Ads are commonly found in the right column of almost all Facebook pages. This column is known as the Ad Space. The ads appearing on this section, about five ads at one time, are sponsored by Facebook users and managed by Facebook’s advertising system. Anyone with a Facebook Page or Facebook Profile can create an ad to promote products or services and link your customers to your Facebook Page or to an external website.

The good thing about Facebook Ad is its superb ad targeting feature, which enables businesses to exactly target audiences with relevant marketing messages. This means you can configure your ads to be seen only by your desired market segments, through a combination of geographical segmentation and specific customer segmentation factors, and pay Facebook on a Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Thousand Impression (CPM) basis and nothing else.

Through geographical segmentation, you can set up your ads to appear on the Facebook profiles or pages of users who are residing in your target location. Then you can further narrow down your targeting criteria using specific customer profile, such as age and birthday, likes and interests, education, and connections.

Last year, M&M embarked on its biggest and perhaps most successful product launch when it introduced M&M’s Pretzel into the market. A key component of this campaign tapped into Facebook’s “highly viral nature”, says Debra Sandler, M&M’s Chief Consumer Officer, to generate awareness and demand on the new M&M product and to encourage wide participation on a product sampling campaign.

Leveraging on M&M’s 1 million Facebook Page fans, the company ran a Facebook Ad, called M&M’s Pretzel Vending Machine which enticed the brand’s facebook connections to sign up and get a free product sample and, at the same time, encouraging them to invite two other friends to also claim a free sample bag.

The campaign enabled M&M to give away 120,000 samples to consumers within just 48 hours! The ad has also increased the number of M&M’s fans on its Facebook Page by 9 percent, reaching 1.2 million as September 2010. Even after the end of the campaign, M&M’s Facebook Page continues to receive favorable consumer feedback.

M&M has since made Facebook an integral part of its advertising program. “It’s a critically important element in our marketing mix”, says Debra, “because we have a direct, authentic and real dialogue with a very important consumer base”.

Now going back to the question, which is better? Is it Facebook Page or Facebook Ad? Actually, there is no definite answer. We cannot say one is better than the other. It ultimately depends on your business goals. What is it that you want to achieve by promoting your business on Facebook? Do you simply want to generate awareness on your brand and interact with your consumers? Perhaps, a Facebook Page is all that you need? But do you want to aggressively drive sales to your company or launch a new product? Perhaps, Facebook Ad can help you more effectively by targeting your sales pitch to the right audience who are most likely going to buy your products or services.

The decision to market your business on Facebook also depends on the availability of trained manpower who will maintain your Facebook presence. It is a must to have a dedicated staff or team who will maintain your Facebook Page to ensure that it always entice meaningful interaction with your fans.

It also boils down to cost. All marketing activities involve cost which can be sometimes painful for business, especially in this period of economic uncertainty. Having a Facebook Page entails no cost, other than the salary of your manpower maintaining your Facebook account. However, running a Facebook Ad involves a fee, which is charged based on your desired number of clicks or impressions. Therefore, at the minimum, it is a must to maintain a Facebook Page to promote your business online and, if your budget permits, optimize this with a Facebook Ad.