Facebook advertising is an efficient way for small business partners to communicate with their customers in a cost-efficient way. The appeal — as of 2012 — of this social networking program has several small business owners believing they must have a presence on the site to remain competitive.

While there are fantastic advantages to embracing social media marketing, there are some issues that turn these advantages into disadvantages of selling your business on Facebook.

Loss of Control

Facebook is designed as an interactive online forum that supports members to share data via video clips, photos, written posts, and links. While owners presently have control of what stays on the public profile, there is limited control over who posts a message or what those posts include.

It is almost natural for an angry customer, disgruntled employee, or competitor, to post negative comments on your wall. Even well-meaning advertisements may use photos or language that are not in order with the concept you want to keep for your market.

Keeping careful control over the content that arrives on your Facebook page takes the time and energy of certified content monitors, which can be expensive and time-consuming for small business proprietors.

Price of Maintenance

Content pages must continuously be updated with new data that readers will find beneficial, exciting, or useful, for marketing to be effective. This needs the development of an innovative, detailed social media marketing plan — an expensive investment for small advertisement budgets.

Facebook advertising plans include interactive forums, video product demonstrations, and online contests, all of which must be uploaded, monitored, created, and maintained by a staff member, social media advertising agency, or business proprietor.

Competition

Marketing programs performed via Facebook are subject to easy duplication by adversaries. Competitors can pose as “friends” or “fans” to gain access to your photos, content, artwork, and other images posted to your website are easily reused and accessed by visitors and can show up in many places you may not permit.

Professionalism

Social media programs like Facebook were designed to promote a relaxed sharing of data that may not agree with the professional character you require to build for your business. For instance, Facebook marketing of a nightclub needs to be considerably different from Facebook marketing of a law practice or doctor’s office.

Attention must be exercised to improve and preserve a Facebook appearance that matches your corporate philosophy, or it could put your company at a negative.

Advertising Costs

While primary Facebook pages are free of charge for individual users, business accounts that highlight advertising come with a price tag. This added promotional rate could be a problem for small business proprietors.

When you buy advertising on Facebook, you spend either by a cost per impressions (CPM) or cost per click (CPC). While the minimum CPM is $.02 and the minimum CPC is $.01, Facebook will typically recommend that you bid higher than that through the pricing period of ad making. If other dealers bid more, their ads are more likely to be shown. This puts small businesses and niche merchants at a disadvantage.

Time Consumption

Using a Facebook page as a component of your digital approach is extremely time-consuming if prepared right. In addition to guarding for negative comments, a company should respond immediately to any positive suggestions or questions posed by clients. Since Facebook is up 24 hours a day, posts may expand quickly.

If a business’s Facebook engagement extends, it may even be obligated to assign an employee rigorously to social media duties. It might not be practical for some companies, making it irrational to maintain a Facebook page accurately.

Negative Content

Interacting with your fans or consumers over Facebook sounds helpful in theory, but some individuals may use your Facebook page as a way to post spam or write rude comments. A user might even post fabricated accusations about your company on your page for everyone to see.

So, your business requires to be watching its Facebook page regularly, ideally checking every single post. Even if you address these problems immediately, you will never know how many clients saw the negative remarks on the page and will connect that concept with your company.

Subscriptions

Just because a client clicks “Like” on your page does not confirm that she will follow your updates in her news feed. To give users control over their experience, the social networking site enables people to unsubscribe from updates.

When a client unsubscribes from your updates, your latest posts will not be visible on her news feed, so she will only see your posts if she decides to visit your page. This makes it challenging to identify precisely how many clients are viewing your posts in their news feeds, so you cannot accurately measure results.