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I have been on Facebook for sometime both personally and for my work. Over the past few years, I have used Facebook to achieve different goals. Some successfully and other ways not so successfully. Here are four areas that you need to evaluate with respect to your Facebook activity. Remember these are my experiences, your experience could be different from mine. I only share these evaluations with you to assist you with your own plan on Facebook.
1) Professional Organizations and Schools
For Me, Facebook is very good for organizations that want to grow their membership. Currently, I belong to a group, Omaha Agri-Business and it has a company page that helps spread the word locally about upcoming meetings. In addition, schools are taking advantage of these pages to help communicate different news about upcoming practices, tournaments and the sharing of pictures online.
2) Companies
I think Facebook is also a place for companies to become more personal with people by sharing blog posts or offering online coupons or drawings. I have noticed a huge drop in the number of impressions on posted information in the last few months. I believe Facebook is really trying to push its ads and it wants companies to embrace ads.
Facebook Ads – You will have the most impressions the very first day to start and from here the numbers fall dramatically and if you want the numbers to go up, you have to pay more money for “Like” clicks and you will find it to be be a very expensive way of advertising.
Online Store- I actually tried and online store on Facebook and sold one item in three months. People tend to not shop for items on Facebook from my experience. Online coupons work much better or links directly to your online store front.
From my experience, I would suggest having a presence, but not getting carried away. Most people are not going to go to Facebook to find my company Fan Page, Midwest Laboratries. Also, if you want more likes, here is a simple tip, have a landing page which forces the reader to like the page first, before they can read the content on the page. Pagemodo.com has a free and paid version. I loaded the free version and I have seen an increase in Likes in just a short period of time.
3) Blogs
I have a Facebook Page for this blog site that will be going away in the next few days. After some careful thought, I decided that repeating content on different sites is not the direction I wanted to take. Also, with the low impression rate, the only way I was growing readers was to personally invite my friends to like the page. If people want to read content on this site, they will come to this site. Also, I just don’t have enough time in a day to keep updating different platforms.
4) Friends
I used my Facebook Personal Profile Page as a page to connect with everyone, yes everyone. I thought the only way I could get content shared was to have a huge following. You can spend a lot of time with this process and invite people to view your company page, but in the end are these people really going to be people who connect with your company brand? In some cases it might work, but most people I know do not go to company pages on a regular basis. Most people may read posts on their wall, but very few engage. As a result, I have reduced the number of friends I have, and I am using Facebook more as a social, personal platform as it was meant to be. By the way, this is a time-consuming process. Also, I am trying to take more steps to protect my personal information. I have reduced information in my personal profile. I don’t think its necessary for Facebook to own my personal data. All this being said, it is a good platform for reconnecting with friends from the past.
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