Some time ago I committed personal "Facebook suicide" but now am forced back into engaging with the social network, simply because I've started to create a business page there. Please join my fragile ego in 'Liking' the business page by clicking the button shown here to the left!
Here's a great list of five mistakes that many businesses make with Facebook marketing. As I start to experiment, I'll be sure to try to avoid them!
- Broadcasting instead of conversing
It's true that most of our engagement will be via Twitter, but fans still want the ability to interact and get relevant news from Facebook. The business needs to be on Facebook, simply because that's where customers are.
- Taking the time
Setting up the Facebook page and then forgetting about it will be a recipe for failure: we have a daily routine of working through various social media properties to try to keep relevant content - and because we know that fans will want timely responses if they engage with us. The challenge is that there are so many channels to communicate across, but it's no good a business refusing to take phone calls because they prefer letters in the mail - the principle is to communicate in whatever way your correspondent chooses to engage!
- Boredom can kill!
This one is going to be hard - at the moment, we're working almost completely round the clock to prepare for a product beta release and we just can't spend as much time as we want being socially innovative! But, tempting as it is, I've resisted auto-publishing the blog feed to Facebook. Automation can come across as too impersonal.
- Failing to learn about Facebook
There is a ton of information out there, and people who run Facebook marketing courses (I plan to make time to attend one) ... It's important to think through how best to present a company logo on Facebook, given its quirky resizing that can damage the visual when the feed goes across the site... In the midst of everything else we have to do to run a business, it's still extremely important to know how to make the best of the tools that you do have at your disposal.
- Sticking to the rules
For me, this is the bottom line why I re-engaged with Facebook. Apart from being against the site's terms of use, it's just not ethical to create a false personality to manage the company Facebook account. I'm still locking down my personal page, not making personal friends, publishing information, photos or status updates ... But I am administering the page as myself and will consider gradually relaxing my personal privacy settings as time goes by.
