Monday, June 23, 2014

Facebook Ads VS Mobile Apps



Recently, Dan Levy, Facebook's director of small business spoke at Facebook Fit about small businesses and Facebook marketing. Currently there are 30 million small businesses with active pages, up 25 million from last year. Facebook is a great way to interact with customers, post useful live information and another great form of digital marketing.

But recently Facebook has gotten a lot of flack due to the fact your posts are reaching smaller and smaller percentages of people. A few years ago you could post and reach majority of your following, now you're lucky if you reach half of them on organic posts.

We wanted to touch on a few benefits of launching your businesses own mobile app over solely relying on your Facebook page to increase foot traffic.

Customer Interaction

Interacting with customers is a great way to build loyalty with consumers. It let's them know you hear them and listen. As we mentioned before, it is becoming increasingly harder to interact with customers on Facebook if they cannot see you.

The benefit of building your businesses mobile app will help you interact with customers. The Grand Apps mobile app platform has a built in fan wall, just like a Facebook wall, where users can interact with your business, ask questions and get answers. As the business owner, you can also login and send out Push Notifications to all app users. This acts as a direct message to the app users which helps you bypass missed messages if you would have just posted that message to your timeline.

Less Competition

Think about the average consumer with 500+ friends and 100+ likes on their Facebook page. Now think about all of your competitors posting information and competing for viewing space on their timeline. Unless you pay for your posts, it's likely you'll be sent to the bottom and missed by hundreds of followers. The competition is very high on Facebook to market your information to the consumers.

A consumers mobile smartphone on the other hand will likely not have 600+ apps downloaded, maybe 50+ max. This means by them having your mobile app on their device, you are only competing with a handful of apps, not thousands of other businesses they like on their Facebook page.

But Facebook is free

In economics there is a term, TANSTAFL, There Ain't No Such Thing As Free Lunch. Some business owners might argue that spending money on a mobile app is not necessarily the best investment because Facebook is free. Indeed it is "free" of charge, it still requires your time, more than managing a mobile app. Calculating your hours worth of work would be step one. Let's say you're worth $200 per hour and you post on Facebook / market on this social media outlet about 1.5 hours per week. That means you spend $300 per week, because if you had that time free you could be growing your business in other areas.

No matter how you look at it, you will spend time on Facebook interacting with customers, so in reality it is not free because it costs your time.

Summary

Traditional approaches to marketing your business is a must and they still work. Facebook still works too, but we just wanted to show you that a mobile app holds more benefits over the Facebook page in regards to competition, time and customer interaction. Our mobile apps have a whole host of other amazing features that would really help out your business too!

 If you are curious how to get started, just request a demo app and we would love to chat with you how these apps can take your business to the next level.

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