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Small businesses could find creating Facebook brand pages is a useful online marketing tool – one expert looks at why.

Writing for Search Engine Journal, Jennifer Horowitz of EcomBuffet.com lists the ways in which small companies can benefit from using the social platform.

Highlighting that it can help to boost search engine rankings, she notes that Facebook can therefore be an effective component of search engine optimisation campaigns.

Meanwhile, fan pages can also help to draw traffic to the website, as these can appear in search engine results pages.

She also notes that if a company's competitors are all on Facebook, this can make joining a particularly good idea.

"I don't normally advocate 'keeping up with the Joneses' just for the sake of it but in this case if they have one and you don't, they are tapping into traffic you aren't," she explains.

And the social media platform has made some recent changes that could particularly benefit small companies, according to Outspoken Media's Lisa Barone, writing a post for Small Business Trends.

These include firms receiving email notifications when something is posted on their Facebook wall.