Facebook and Your Brand:
Do You Know What You’re Doing?

Marketers are always thinking about what’s next. In the past five years or so, outstanding new “nexts” for marketers to consider emerged including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. Now some more new stuff is germinating, but more on that later (read on).

Hearing about these trends is one thing. Doing is another matter. There has been a lot of confusion lately around Facebook and the kind of set-up a company should have. We examined some of the options to show you the benefits and limitations of each.

So, let’s dig in and see.

Facebook started as a site for college students to set up profiles and quickly communicate with their network. People found power in advocacy around shared concerns. Thus the “People for...” Groups started popping up. The shared affinity concept became an outstanding way for marketers to understand more about their brands and organizations. Facebook is now open to anyone with an email address, and it has more than 500 million active users (according to Facebook).

Note that Facebook, like most websites and applications, is in a constant cycle of change. So, this information is current from when we started writing the article, but may be outdated by the time you finish reading it!

What you need to know comes down to a few factors.

• How personally connected do you want to be with your marketing communications?
• How much interaction do you want between your brand and its Facebook followers?
• How many people are you expecting to reach?

Individual Profiles

Facebook profiles exist for personal accounts, but if people are closely associating you (or your president/spokesperson) with your company you may find yourself with many friend requests from those who are interested in your brand. As long as you’re comfortable with personally representing your company on Facebook, this might be the route for you. You’re able to personally interact with your “friends” through wall posts, messages and event invitations. However, at 5,000 friends you’ll hit Facebook’s friend limit. Also watch out about how you promote your business on your profile (Facebook’s terms state that you will not use your personal profile for commercial gain). Let’s review:

• Designed for personal connections (friends and family)
• Indexed by search engines depending on your privacy settings
• For 5,000 friends or fewer

What Makes a Group a Group?

Groups have the power to bring people together over a common interest—in this case your company. Groups are still directly connected with your personal profile, but members aren’t necessarily your friends. A Group allows you to send out bulk invitations to join the Group, and once joined, those members can also send out invites to their friends. This allows for Groups to be used as a valuable viral marketing tool in which members invite other members, exponentially expanding the Group’s member base. Unfortunately, the member base is also limited to 5,000 people. However, notifying members with updates and news is easy through bulk messages that are sent to members’ inboxes. To sum it up:

• For somewhat personal connections through a common interest (friends, family, colleagues, network)
• Not indexed by search engines
• For 5,000 members or fewer

Pages

Facebook Pages were created to serve as profiles for businesses, celebrities and the like. Therefore, a Page is its own profile, with no direct personal connection to the administrator’s account (in order to set up the Page an email address is required, but it won’t be displayed). People can choose to “Like” the Page, at which point they would see the Page updates in their own News Feed. They can then share these items with their friends. As you can see, this can have a viral affect.

There are two key things to note about Pages.

1. There is no limit to the number of people who can Like a Page. Therefore, your brand has the potential to have thousands or millions of people following the updates and news you post on the Page.
2. Pages are indexed by search engines and will come up in search results on Google, Yahoo, etc. to anyone who performs the search, even if they’re not on Facebook.

The long and the short of it:

• For less personal connections (brand to consumer relationship)
• Indexed by search engines
• Unlimited number of people who can Like the Page

So profile, Group or Page? Are you looking for personal interaction or a large fan base that follows your updates? Think about how far you want your reach to be. Of course, for those who can’t decide, there’s always the solution of creating two or three of the options, although we’re sure Facebook is already concocting something new that will be the next way we promote our brands.

Smart marketing in social media is directly correlated to the time and money invested. While access is often free, success comes at a price. Like all marketing tactics, measure it against your goals to ensure results.

On the horizon, and all around you already, is one new “next”—known as “place marketing.” Google and Facebook have applications running in this space and applications like FourSquare and Yelp and many more are defining it second-by-second. Look for more about place marketing in future issues of 6x or get a jump start by contacting Adsoka today.