The Distributed Marketing Blog has highlighted some of the key traps that businesses can fall into when trying to make an impression on Facebook:
1. Creating profile instead of page. People have profiles, businesses have pages. Here are few of the big differences. Pages can have tabs, and page owners have much more control over how their pages look, what kinds of features they can add to their pages, and what kind of analytics and reports they can get.
2. Failing to understand EdgeRank. The wall is the basic way to deliver Facebook fan page message. Every post gets post quality score. low post quality score, as determined by an algorithm called EdgeRank, means that your post won’t actually be seen by very many people. (EdgeRank has to do with the number of interactions, such as likes, comments, shares, and how much attention post gets in short period of time.) Posts with high EdgeRanks stay in the newsfeed, posts with low ones don’t.
3. Posting too often – or too rarely. Posts made in the morning (before 8am) and on weekends get more “buzz” than posts made in the middle of work day.
4. Treating corporate fan page like profile. This may sound like faux pas #1, but the point here is that pages provide custom tabs, while profiles don’t. Custom Facebook tabs provide the perfect tool for business objectives like growing mailing list, subscribing to blog, generating discussions, and so on. Not using the Facebook fan page as landing page that delivers clear calls to action deprives your business of the chance to harness the real power of Facebook. Now you can use html for this instead of the custom coding language fbml – Facebook mark-up language – required until recently. This makes it easier to create the custom look you want.
5. Forgetting Facebook ad tools. The Facebook ad platform is great way to find customers on Facebook. You don’t even have to launch an ad to use it, either. The process for setting up Facebook ad allows targeting by specific demographics or audiences based on their interests, age, gender, location and so on. If you want to know what the potential for your brand is on Facebook, start the process of launching Facebook ad – you’ll be amazed what kind of information Facebook will deliver, free.
6. Rushing the process. If you think of Facebook as marketing channel, and your Facebook page as the lynchpin in leveraging that new communications channel, then you’re not likely to create and post page in five minutes or less. Sure, you could – but doing that just isn’t smart. Smart marketers plan the process, from how the page will look, to who will update content, to what messages will (and won’t) be shared on Facebook. One big part of the planning process is handling customer comments – positive and negative – and mobilisng appropriate resources when (not if) an unhappy customer uses your fan page to vent or ask for resolution to problem.
See distributedmarketing.org for more.
