måndag 18 juli 2011

Facebook as a business platform

Facebook is the place to be for everyone- or is it?


Think back a couple of years when Facebook pretty much was about sharing occasional vacation photos, sharing a cool memory, joining groups and inviting friends to your birthday-party. Those days are long gone..

Social gaming, Social Marketing, Liking, putting some of your friends to limited profile because you don't have the guts to completely erase them are some of the trends that have emerged on the book of faces. Last year the dominating social-game developers made more money than Facebook itself, so indeed the trends and our behavior on the platform have changed rapidly and radically.

I stumbled across a discussion at a group on Linkedin about smaller companies entering Facebook, I took part in the discussions and eagerly read the comments. Pretty much 90 % of the comments were encouraging small businesses to join Facebook without any kind of hesitation. Below I shall try to explain why a small business should or shouldn't enter Facebook.

Think small companies that are included in your everyday life; your local grocery store, hairdresser, the small candy store just down the street... Now Facebook them. What you might discover is that they can be found on Facebook which is good... or is it? I've seen hundreds and hundreds of small businesses, either B2C companies with direct access to their customers or the small B2B companies selling bolts and screws to the local tire-dealer. Now, what a lot of these companies has got in common is that they entered Facebook some one year ago, managed to get 20 likes or followers (mostly friends and family) and made one text entry: "We made it to Facebook!!!!!!!" or "We're finally here to assist you"... And that's it, the page is dead, passwords forgotten and the people who liked the page one year ago completely forgot that they ever liked it in the first place. Now that's social suicide. Either you're in or you stay out in the cold, or as the proverb says; Can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen!

Some basic, yet quite essential guidelines before entering Facebook:

-A small business should have a clear strategy on WHY they want to be on Facebook
- Do we have a clear goal, Are we trying to track down potential customers and HOW?
-What do we intend to share?
- How can we get more likes?
- How can we engage our 'fans' to share our page?
- How can we engage the users to comment and share multimedia on our wall?
- How can we use their feedback in order to make better products and services?
- How can we use other social media platforms to make our content interesting (Youyube, Picasa, Blogs etc.)?


Now this very first blog is more of a checklist and a hand break for smaller businesses that intend to join Facebook.

This is a great example of a  Social Suicide, the company is an advertisement agency that among others specializes in social media marketing.. Quite the irony...

Happy Facebooking and good luck!



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