Facebook as a Business Tool: Opportunities and Challenges

This report examines Facebook as a business tool, exploring its potential for business development, marketing, and customer engagement. It highlights Facebook's integrated marketing communication approach, which aids businesses through multimedia promotional campaigns, and discusses its impact across sectors like retail, e-commerce, and tourism. The report analyzes the benefits of Facebook, such as increased customer reach and cost-effectiveness, while also addressing the disadvantages, including privacy concerns and the need for secure transactions. It references studies and examples, such as ASOS, to illustrate Facebook's effectiveness and provides insights into the platform's role in modern business strategies. The report emphasizes the importance of being conscious of the authenticity of information available online alongside the security of consumer transactions and personal information as there is no such gate keeping when it comes to business transactions. This report provides a comprehensive overview of Facebook's impact on business communications, drawing on various sources to present a balanced view of its advantages and disadvantages.

Running head: FACEBOOK AS A BUSINESS TOOL
Facebook as a business Tool
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FACEBOOK AS A BUSINESS TOOL
The world of social media has no doubt brought in ample amount of business
development opportunities alongside its very strong networking and marketing approach. The
reach, the speed coupled with cost effectiveness is increasingly making social media the most
chosen platform for business transactions by large as well as small scale companies.
According to Baruah (2012), Facebook with its 2.27 billion monthly users has potential to
promote business products and services, increase customer retention and support as well as
boost recognition.. In this article, the central emphasis would be in understanding the
potentials of Facebook in business development and what are its wide spread impact across
varied business sector.
. The concept of Facebook for business is no doubt an integrated marketing
communication approach which according Çaliciolu, (2014) aids the business organisation by
providing multi-media promotional campaign ether through its class advertisings attractive
announcement aspects or sponsored brand advertising stories. To better analyse the impact of
Facebook on business, it is beneficial to analyse what makes Facebook so attractive to
marketers as well as consumers. According to the market researchers the financial flexibility
that the business developers aim to achieve in their business operation is making them opt for
this radical shift from mainstream banking to mobile banking services where the very process
of managing financing is getting digitalised. Facebook in such a scenario is helping these
banks develop mobile built apps which have significantly gained a lot of popularity in the
past five years. Mobile banking apps like “Chat Banker”, “Paym” have altogether
revolutionized the experience of financial service sector for its customers (Rao, 2016).
In the retail and e- commerce business, Facebook for Business has shown tremendous
success results where it ensures perfect reach of the brand across its 2.5 billion user base
every month, to bringing in more buyers through effortless signup process, email marketing
and hassle free mobile app installations to finally making the sell happen. One of the leading

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FACEBOOK AS A BUSINESS TOOL
example in this sector is ASOS, the online fashion retailer operating on a dynamic mobile
platform which has significantly used Facebook ads to get customised and personalised
advertising messages spread across varied social media platforms and increase sales by
volumes (Agrawal, 2019) Even the tourism business sector has been immensely aided by
Facebook as Destination marketing which is increasingly becoming popular in today’s age of
digitalisation.
However the immense business opportunity does come with certain core
disadvantages which the marketers need to be conscious about while doing business on
Facebook. First and foremost in the privacy concerns of the customers involved. The
marketers must ensure that the online business websites do not hold any personal information
of the customers without their permission (Debatin, et al. 2009) The concept of Facebook for
business is no doubt an integrated marketing communication approach which according to
Dwyer & Hopwood (2019) aids the business organisation by providing multi-media
promotional campaign ether through its class advertisings attractive announcement aspects or
sponsored brand advertising stories. However one needs to be quite conscious regarding the
authenticity of information available online alongside the security of consumer transactions
and personal information as there is no such gate keeping when it comes to business
transactions.

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FACEBOOK AS A BUSINESS TOOL
Agrawal, H., (2019). Why You Should Use Social Media for Your Business. ShoutMeLoud.
Retrieved on 10th April 2020, from: https://www.shoutmeloud.com/benefits-of-using-
social-media-for-business.html
Baruah, T. D. (2012). Effectiveness of Social Media as a tool of communication and its
potential for technology enabled connections: A micro-level study. International
Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 2(5), 1-10:
Çaliciolu, C. (2014). Facebook as a marketing communications tool-Facebook official pages
content analysis for Jordanian telecommunications companies in the mobile operators
sector. International journal of business and social science, 5(4):
Debatin, B., Lovejoy, J. P., Horn, A. K., & Hughes, B. N. (2009). Facebook and online
privacy: Attitudes, behaviors, and unintended consequences. Journal of computer-
mediated communication, 15(1), 83-108
Dwyer, J., & Hopwood, N. (2019). The business communication handbook. Cengage AU.
South Melbourne, VIC : Cengage Learning Australia, 2019:
Rao, N. R. (Ed.). (2016). Social Media Listening and Monitoring for Business
Applications. Hershey: Business Science Reference.