Facebook is one of the longest established social platforms out there. But it's not only for posting family photos and sharing the latest memes.

A Facebook Business page is a useful tool for your business, and an excellent way to expand the reach and scope of your marketing. With 2.9bn users on the Facebook platform, there’s a huge potential audience for you to target.

Creating an engaging social media presence

A Facebook presence is an excellent way to promote your products and/or services, with a range of different digital marketing tools to help you reach your intended customers.

Social media marketing is an increasingly vital element of a 21st century marketing mix. More than 50% of revenue across 14 major industries is generated by social sales, and Facebook is one of the main social platforms to master if you want to make the most of the power of social.

A Facebook Business page helps you to:

• Quickly create an online presence for your company – we all know the value of a company website, but if time and resources are tight then a Facebook Business page is an excellent starting point for your company’s online presence. A page is quick and easy to set up and gives your business a home on Facebook to start promotional activity.

• Present a more professional side to the company – it’s against Facebook’s terms and conditions to use your own personal Facebook profile to sell business services. So, creating a Facebook Business page is the ideal way to overcome this, while also presenting a more professional and business-like profile to the outside world. Facebook Business pages also provide more features for reaching your audience.

• Give yourself a hub for news, offers and updates – your Facebook Business page gives you an area to connect with your existing customers, potential prospects and new followers. You can post news about the company, profiles of you and your team, or promote your seasonal discounts, offers and new product/service updates etc.

• Boost posts and aim them at a highly targeted audience – once your page is set up, you can begin posting content and updates. But to maximise the reach of your posts, you can also pay to ‘boost’ specific posts – helping you to target a more specific audience and to increase the global, national or local reach of your post.

• Create detailed paid advertising – Facebook has a full toolkit of digital advertising tools to choose from, allowing you to drill down into the demographics, location and interests of your preferred audience and target your boosted posts or paid adverts with an almost forensic level of detail. And with detailed statistics to analyse your advertising and social reach, you can easily see which posts are getting good engagement and which ones are falling short of the mark.

• Create a more rounded social presence – by using Facebook as a key part of your digital marketing mix – alongside Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube etc. – you create a broad and rounded social presence for the business. By increasing your followers and being smart with your social content, you will expand your marketing reach and bring in more customers, more sales and more revenue.

If your company has yet to set up a Facebook Business page, you could be missing out on a critical marketing channel.