¶ … Business
There has been some disagreement among people about whether Facebook is good for business. Some people suggest that Facebook is an invaluable marketing tool that can really help business, particularly emerging businesses, by helping them with publicity. Other people warn about the dark side of Facebook. Although it allows good news about businesses to spread virally, it also leaves businesses open to some dangers. For example, unlike on business websites, businesses have no control over what people say about them on Facebook, so that a disgruntled customer or a customer with a grudge might be able to do significant damage to a company's reputation, even if such damage is actually unwarranted by the underlying scenario. Despite that caveat, there are five ways that Facebook is good for business: 1) it allows a business to manage its reputation; 2) it allows a business to engage in event promotion;
it helps a business move up in its Google rankings; 4) it allows business to recruit employees; and 5) it promotes relationship-building.
In order to understand why Facebook is good for business, it is important to understand Facebook's function. Facebook is a social media tool. In that way, Facebook is not a business tool, though it can be used for business purposes. Instead, it is a social tool. In this way, Facebook is essentially the same as other social marketing tools. Therefore, a business should not approach Facebook as a new venture, but within the existing context of media and marketing. Moreover, it should approach Facebook as a social networking tool. Is the business one that would realistically benefit from positive word-of-mouth that would spread on a social networking site? A new restaurant would traditionally avail itself of social media; a new funeral home would not. These same guidelines are going to apply to Facebook, just as they would have applied to businesses in a pre-Facebook environment.
The first...
In many ways, businesses can be at the mercy of customers or other disgruntled parties in an online environment. It is not unusual for unhappy customers to post about bad experiences and the internet means that complaints can reach a much broader audience than they could have in previous time. However, Facebook provides companies with the opportunity of addressing complaints levied against the company, and in the same venue where the complaints are being made. This allows for a real-time response to customer complaints and gives businesses the opportunity, not only to engage in superior customer service, but to publicly demonstrate that they are engaging in superior customer service. Facebook also allows companies the opportunity to showcase strengths. While many ratings systems are going to be focused on people who are either extremely happy or extremely unhappy with service, Facebook is different. People will "like" or "fan" a company on Facebook in scenarios where they would not go to that company's individual website and make a positive comment because "liking" things is part of the Facebook experience. Likewise, people are likely to leave positive comments on a company's page, because commenting is part of the Facebook experience.
The second way that Facebook is good for business is that it gives businesses an opportunity to engage in event promotion and focus on those things that customers might enjoy. Of course, the type of event that might be promoted would depend upon the nature of the company. However, just today, on Facebook, I observed Facebook groups promoting: a Greek Festival, a special wine-tasting event for a winery, and a Slumber Parties 24-hour sale. These companies could email the same information to consumers, but the customers would have to open the emails to read the text of the information, whereas it is just presented as part of information…
