Facebook is an amazing creation. As a Facebook user, you can post pictures or thoughts, and all your friends get the opportunity to see them, partially on their own terms. Some of your friends will unfollow you, but that’s cool, actually – Facebook makes it easy to choose what you don’t want to see and it learns what you want to see over time.
If you post something that you want even more people to see, you can pay about $5 to have 500 or so additional people see it (Facebook calls this “boosting” your post). It doesn’t go to 500 random people, though – it shows up on more of your friend’s feeds as well as their friends’ feeds (there are more options, but this is the most compelling). More money => even more people.
Think about that … if you have a message you want to spread, the friends of your friends are probably the perfect people to reach. Facebook lets you reach them for as little as $5. Amazing.
That’s vaguely interesting for a person, but it’s genuinely useful for businesses. That’s where Facebook Pages come in. A Page is the organizational equivalent of a person. When you Like someone’s Facebook Page, it’s a lot like becoming their friend. Some of their posts will show up in your feed, but more importantly, the owner of the Page can pay to reach you and your friends.
For example, friends of mine own Grand Rapids Popcorn Company, and I like their Page. If they had a special event or sale they wanted to promote, they could post about it, and I might see it. But then they could pay to boost that post, and not only would I probably see it, but many of my friends would see it, too (they have 3,000+ likes, so they could probably reach 30,000 people or so with about $100). They could even restrict the boosted post to people living in Grand Rapids if they wanted to. Where else can they get targeted advertising like that for such a low price? Nowhere.
Facebook even makes it easy to embed a Like button in another page – click Like below to show my friends at grpopcorn some love!
My company, Moraware, has a Page as well, but unless you work for a countertop fabricator (our target market), I don’t want you to Like it. When you ask people to Like your page who aren’t in your target market, you just made it more expensive to reach your target market! More isn’t always better … if you want people to Like your Page, give them a reason, and then be patient. There’s an art to growing a Page, but that’s a topic for another day.
My point for of all this today is that you probably are the target market for Foley Racing, the Page I made for our family’s go-karting adventures. We’re going to be posting updates for the next 15 weeks or so, but I don’t want to bombard my personal friends with that each week. By posting to a Page, we’re letting you choose whether you want to hear about it each week or just once in a while (hey, we’ll still post the big milestones like our first win to our personal timelines!). It also makes it really easy for Paula and me to post pictures to the same place and always know where to find them, which is quite handy. So if you want to follow our race team’s progress this year, just click Like below or visit our Page once in a while.