What about Facebook?
We have recently had several discussions about the advisability of using Facebook to promote your business. There are clearly some differences of opinion around, so I wanted to add a few thoughts that may be of some interest.
First, I have to say that it appears to me that if you are marketing to a particular demographic, and that demographic is heavily represented on Facebook in terms of presence, time spent on site, and ability to be influenced, Facebook is certainly a strategy that you should consider. Whether it is worth the effort required to become effective is a judgment call that different businesses might decide differently.
Several important things to keep in mind when considering your own strategy are:
- Facebook is relatively new and “unstable”, in that many features are being added constantly and changes are being made to how the whole system operates. This makes it hard to get a clear handle on how one should best utilize the application.
- Users’ familiarity with the features of the application vary widely from those heavily involved in their interactions with it, to many others who are basically just there to see what is going on, to everything in between. To be effective, you have to understand who you are targeting and where they fit on this spectrum.
- With all the changes taking place, you could easily find that on any given day, something has been done that wipes out all the effort that you have invested in establishing yourself in the community. In the near past, Google changed its policy about hosting their blog content on different servers and dramatically altered the benefits of using the free Blogger software that many of us depended upon.
As an interesting aside, I know several people who have recently complained that their involvement with Facebook has become a compulsion. Others have commented that being on Facebook is so involving that it takes away from work time. If the people that I want to reach fall into these groups that just can’t stay off of Facebook, I want to be somewhere on Facebook!
With that as perspective, I offer a couple of links that people might find helpful in getting some explanation of what Facebook might do for them. The first is a blog post describing new features that Facebook released in 2010 that are oriented toward business use. This is a good brief description that will help people who might have an interest in digging into this further. In that same post, they provide references to other sources of information, one of which is a Facebook Product Guide, which I thought was also useful and interesting. This is a PDF file that you can download to your computer (or read online, as you prefer).