What are the benefits that you receive from having a Facebook business page?
Can you even answer this question?
It can be a difficult question to answer if you have not been using Facebook effectively.
The way you should look at it is as "building a pipeline" of future customers.  If you don't take advantage of Facebook than you will simply not have this pipeline in the future and the sooner you start using it effectively then the sooner you will have new customers.

If you have ever seen the Erik Qualman "Socialnomics" videos, in particular the video entitled "Social Media ROI: Socialnomics" then you may know that people ask "What is our ROI for using social media?" Erik Qualman answers, "What's the ROI of your phone?"

By the way, there is no written-in-stone solution to how you should be using Facebook.  You should be using it to communicate with your past present and future customers.  Please note that I said communicate with.  Please don't simply think that you can use Facebook to blast your followers with marketing messages every day.  This will lead to unlikes.  Also, posting recipes for apple pies may not be the best of tactics.  I am not going to tell you what you should do other than tell you that you need to communicate and sometimes that means posting questions and sometimes it could even mean posting an apple pie recipe but I know that just posting images of your inventory will not work.

So here is the key.  Experiment.  Take advantage of things that work and stop doing things that do not.  Facebook insights can be a very powerful tool in determining what is proving effective and what isn't.

Now let's talk about "Likes".  I have often asked business owners why they want to increase their "likes" on their Facebook page.  Many times I received this as an answer "We want to be liked by consumers."  They say this in a way that somehow the number of likes on their Facebook page validates whether they are a good business or not.  In actuality be increasing the number of likes that you have it increases your potential customers.  It actually is not simply the number of likes that you have (as you can actually buy "fake" likes) but rather the quality of the people that like your page.  The more that that interact with your page the better.  By interacting on your page, by liking a post or commenting on a post they are telling their friends about you.  The typical Facebook user has 130 friends on Facebook so you can see the value of getting them to interact on your page.

The real value of likes is building a following of people that will see your future posts.  You obviously want as many people as possible to see your future posts on Facebook and cannot simply rely on people coming to your Facebook page from a link on your website.  You should be integrating social media and Facebook especially into your business.  This includes email signatures, service invoices, as well as print media just to name a few opportunities.

Now here is where a wrench gets thrown into the works.  (Sorry for the pun).  If you have 1,000 likes on your page and in the future you post something "How many people do you think will see your post?"  The answer used to be potentially 1,000.  Not anymore.  Facebook now uses an algorithm called "EdgeRank" to determine who to show your future posts to.  So even though you many have 1,000 likes your future posts may only show in the newsfeeds of 200 people.  Bummer, right?  Well there are ways to improve your EdgeRank and increase the number of people that see your posts.

The more that you can get people interacting with your page the better.  Get people to like posts - improve EdgeRank.  Get people to comment on posts - improve EdgeRank.  The more interactions that people have with your page the better your EdgeRank will be.  Another factor is how many times people visit your Facebook page.  For many businesses, they may get people to like their page but many of these people may never return to their Facebook page, which could potentially mean that their exposure to future posts is diminished.  

This is exactly why we, Bleapp.com - Facebook apps, developed our suite of apps.  By adding functionality to your Facebook page you can encourage people to like your page.  Offer service coupons but require them to like your page.  I am not going to talk about all of our apps but I do want to mention our most powerful one.

Scratch Off is a powerful, viral Facebook promotion application for pages.  People can install and configure a Scratch Off Promotion on their page with our app.  Plus you can control how often people can play.  You can set it to once per day!  Every time someone plays and tries to win the app posts in their timeline and in their friends' newsfeeds!  So if you remember what I said about EdgeRank and the importance of getting them to interact on your page many bells are going off.  They should be.  Does it work?

ChapStick UK ran 2 - 1 week campaigns giving away tubes of ChapStick.  Their page went from 8,100 likes to over 32,000 likes.  Engagement has improved.  When they were running their campaigns many people were playing once per day!  What did this do?  You got it!  It improved their "EdgeRank".  People had to like their page to play.  Every time they scratched off they told all of their friends and they came back to their page daily.
Demo: https://www.facebook.com/bleapp/app_160116404051502

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