It’s hard to believe that Facebook is only 5 years old, especially when you consider that the site now serves over 200 million people across the globe. These numbers are shocking as I think of my first Facebook experience and how drastically things have changed since then. I created my Facebook profile in June 2005 after learning about the for-college-students-only site at my UNC-CH orientation. Since the early days, Facebook has been something unusually personal, where I can be myself and communicate with people who know me or want to know me.
Because Facebook has such a personal connotation to so many people, marketers and companies must be careful with how they approach potential and current consumers on the site. Facebook, despite having strict rules for advertising, has been fairly helpful to businesses by giving them options for speaking directly to their target audience through fan pages. These pages have undergone changes recently that help companies become more engaged with consumers, however some have taken these privileges overboard to become more of a nuisance than a welcomed friend. Here are a few things I advise NOT doing with a company fan page:
1. Send promotional messages. – Some people use Facebook messaging like email. I honestly couldn’t tell you the email addresses of most of my college friends, but that doesn’t matter, because we have Facebook. Since these messages are like email to many of us, promotional messages give us the same icky feeling as spam. It is especially annoying, and inappropriate, when companies hire Facebook users to send these messages and pose as legitimate acquaintances.
2. Give fans a daily update. – Facebook allows companies to send updates to their fans that appear on a users news feed just like friend requests, event invitations and wall notifications. These updates should be used to express big changes or events, not detail every little development. If the updates aren’t relevant or too frequent then it will be ignored and possibly blocked, so keep them to a minimum.
3. Send invitations to random people. – The other day I received an invitation to be a fan of a park in another state that I had never been to and never heard of before. As someone who lives hundreds of miles away, I am clearly not in their target audience. Send invitations to users who fit the profile of a potential customer or have expressed interested in the company but might not have known about the fan page.
4. Don’t update the company profile. – There is nothing worse than a company that creates a fan page, only to let it sit there for months and months without a hint of new content. The new fan pages offer a variety of applications that can link to a Twitter page, blog or newsroom as well as space to upload photos and videos. Taking a few minutes every week to add new content to the company page will help keep users engaged and encourage interaction.
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Tags: Facebook, Marketing in a Recession
