“It’s where we talk to our families, isn’t it?”
Yes, and no.
Although Facebook is one of the most popular social networks in the world, to use it effectively as a business requires a little bit of time and investment in a Facebook business page to stand out from the crowd. The benefit of a page is that there are no other users posts to trawl through to get to your favourite followers or customers.
What you do have to do, is make sure that your information is going to be interesting and relevant to the people reading it, or they may very well “unlike” your page again and disappear from view forever.
Facebook does take a little hard work and planning, but the biggest problem we face with it, is information overload.
While we’d all love to sit and chat over a cup of tea and a coffee, and find out about Auntie Jeannie, business needs to use the time spent on Facebook wisely.
Using it wisely really means factoring in some time in the day where you can really spend some quality time deciding how you are going to approach Facebook, and how it fits into your marketing plan.
It’s pointless sitting and spending 4 hours a day talking on Facebook, to people from London and further afield if you sell socks on a market stall in Aberdeen City Centre and don’t plan to ever go online. That’s an extreme example for sure, but unless you want to get to the end of the day with no pennies in your pocket but plenty of gossip under your belt, you get the gist of the idea.
There are success stories galore on Facebook.
- The Pampered Chef has built themselves a very nice reputation with nearly 450,000 likes.
- Appliances Online with over 300,000 likes, holds competitions, giveaways and very popular web camera chats with customers.
- As a store, Toys R Us are a favourite dislike of mine due to a bad customer service experience, but they can’t be faulted on their use of Facebook, with nearly 3 million fans, regular interaction, competition, and even with it’s own blogging circle of parents who repeatedly advertise their company through blogging about their toys as Toyologists.
Facebook is the one social media that I just can’t seem to find much time for. I have a blog account and I have a personal account that really only has close family and adoption contacts on it. I’d love to find the time to do more on it, but if the time fairies could send me some extra seconds in a day, I’d be forever grateful.