The aim behind increasing web presence is to not only increase the brand awareness, but also increase brand image. You easily achive brand awareness or brand recall with advertising, but increasing brand image is more difficult. Any decision with regards to a new product is taken considering if it will fit the brand image or not.

The online brand developing is not as difficult as offline. The basics remain the same, but is much cheaper to build a brand online than offline. For example, the online customer service is usually restricted to email and responses to blog posts and questions in the forum. This is easier to handle, and much cheaper than real time call centers.

Of course, emails may not be able to fully replace human interaction, but it can reduce it by quite a big margin. And advertising as well as promotion of a product or serice is much cheaper online than in the real world.

Brand developing is all about creating an image of the brand in the minds of the people. One of the easiest ways to do this is to increase the interaction between people and the organization. Having a website is the minimum for an organization, buti n a corporate website there is not much interaction you can have with your customers. Many sites have a "contact us" link and some even have a complaints page where you can log in and put in your complaints, but doing so in Facebook just increases the personal touch.

For example, while if you manufacture toasters and if a customer has a complaint with it, there is not much of a different between asking them to log into your website and post their complaint and asking them to do so on your Facebook page. The difference is that in Facebook they will be connected to you. As soon as your company response the customer will know about it instantly. Companies that do not have good customer service always think this technique unuseful. But who spend on customer satisfaction will find this useful. Imagine if you have a team that has a turn around time of less than four hours for every complaint, this is a good way to make your customers really feel that you care by giving them a resolution in under four hours. Even if you had as good a team, there is no point in it unless the customer realizes it, and Facebook ensures that your customers do.

And if you use Facebook you don't need to integrate the different facets into your customer service so that they receive and answer via email but this needs more resources. But if somebody connects to you on Facebook you do not have to worry about anything else other than resolving their issue, Facebook takes care of the rest. Not only this, but the customer's own personal network will also be aware of your response, especially if he clicks on a "thumbs up" sign signifying that he was happy with your service. This may take time to build, but it gives you more returns than any other CRM tool.

Having a website is all good and well, but you need different tools for different purposes. The advantage of Facebook is that it has an already existing infrastructure as well as over 600 million users, while at the same time being cheap to use, so you do not have to spend any resources in developing a tool for yourself.