When we first heard that Facebook for Business had debuted, we were thinking a separate section of Facebook was created just for the business community. It wasn’t.
Facebook for Business tells people how they can build a Facebook page, interact with others and use Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories.
“Business owners can learn best practices for creating a Page and engaging customers in a two-way conversation to answer questions, get valuable feedback, and to reach their friends,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an email to InformationWeek. “Businesses can learn how to find new customers before they search for them using Facebook’s targeted Ads, and bring customers from the Web into their stores. And we want to inspire small businesses by seeing how other businesses have found success on Facebook by sharing their stories.”
Facebook really isn’t offering anything new. They are just highlighting their marketing uses for business, probably to underscore how much Google+ left that part out. In fact, some businesses were creating Google+ business pages, even though it wasn’t allowed. Google shut them down and a lot of people got really irritated. But the bottom line is that there are already 20 million people on Google+ and they want the business aspect, dammit!
Facebook knows this, hence Facebook for Business. We haven’t had a chance to poke around in it yet, but we’ll post our thoughts when we do.