Is your business using Facebook to its full potential? Probably not, according to the company.
At the first stop on Facebook Fit, the social network's five-city roadshow, the company’s small business director Dan Levy told a crowd of business owners in New York City on Tuesday that 30 million small businesses now have Facebook Pages—up from 25 million in November. But many business owners still aren’t maximizing Facebook’s extensive arsenal of free tools to help them identify, connect with and engage with potential customers, Levy said. (Part of Facebook’s goal with promoting all of these free services, of course, is to encourage more small businesses to buy advertising on the site, which currently only 1 million businesses do.)
Levy offered the audience several examples of underutilized Facebook tools that can help small businesses:
Custom Audiences: Through Facebook’s ad manager, businesses can use customers’ Facebook IDs, email addresses or phone numbers to create customized lists. The point of this tool is to allow businesses to better target their promotions and ads at similar types of customers rather than broad, varied groups of people.
Lookalike Audiences: Businesses can upload customized lists of customers and Facebook will find a larger audience with the same characteristics. If you upload a customer list of 20-somethings who own dogs in your city, for example, Facebook will find you other 20-something dog owners in your area.
Offline Conversion Tracking: Facebook offers businesses many insights into how its advertising leads to online referrals and sales. But it recently launched a new service to help businesses track offline sales. Businesses buy ads and then send Facebook privacy-safe data on who bought what. Facebook will tell them how much people who saw the ads bought compared to those who didn’t.
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