Business Branding on Facebook-The Right Way
Today’s most popular social networking site has been suffering from growing pains, mostly surrounding the idea of how to monetize their audience of one half billion members. That’s about 5,000 times the number of people who watch the Superbowl, so you would think that capitalizing on that audience share through advertising would work, but it doesn’t–at least not for the kind of ads Facebook displays and the kind of money advertisers are willing to pay.
Instead, Facebook hopes to build the same sort of success with businesses that they have had with people’s personal pages. They want to be the one place where people go to look for, learn about, and engage with businesses. To accomplish this goal they need to encourage businesses to join Facebook, and that is why they created the Fan Page.
Facebook doesn’t even call them Fan Pages anymore. Instead, they are simply called Pages. Your page lets you build a presence on Facebook, engage with your audience, spread your message, connect with Facebook users on your website, and encourage conversations. Custom tabs can be created to feature coupons, promote specials, share videos, and set up events. It’s a full palette of features, and it’s just for businesses, brands, and non-profit agencies.
The dangerous side of your business presence comes in the way customers perceive your presence. When they are connecting with your business, they may think they are connecting with you. If they have a bad experience with one of your representatives, they may take their complaints to your Facebook Page because they expect this to be the online equivalent of asking to speak to the owner.
To add another complication, what if the person they are complaining about also happens to be one of your Facebook page administrators? That complaint could be deleted and you wouldn’t know about it unless there was an even bigger backlash because of it. Large businesses have marketing, public relations, or customer care groups to handle these situations. But for smaller businesses, there are only two courses I see to this situation. You either need to be your own Facebook Page administrator, or you need to bring in help from outside. This is where the social marketing experts come in.
Social marketing experts can set up your page for you, develop guidelines for Facebook engagement, monitor your presence, promote your brand, and provide a direct channel of communication to the top when there is a problem that needs your attention. This service isn’t free, but in the context of a marketing budget, you should be able to identify a level of service that suits any business.
How is Facebook going to make money with Pages? Nobody knows at this point, but you can be certain that once businesses are engaging with their customers on Facebook, they will not want to stop. In the future, a Facebook Page will likely come with a price tag. But for now, the time is right to add your business to the mix and start connecting with your customers.
Tags: brand ambassadors > Facebook > social marketing > social media
Comments
One Response to “Business Branding on Facebook-The Right Way”
Leave a Reply
August 18th, 2010 @ 12:14 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TimPiazza, Amy Hughes. Amy Hughes said: RT @TimPiazza: Please read my latest blog post: "Business Branding on Facebook-The Right Way" – http://tinyurl.com/36yzje9 #FB [...]