Facebook: should businesses bother?

Facebook: should businesses bother?

One of the most common questions we’re asked is whether businesses should be using social networking as a marketing channel. The answer is usually “yes…”, and left at that, people who are new to the idea of social networking for business tend to head towards Facebook and Twitter – maybe because they have personal profiles already, or maybe because they receive so much media coverage.

Twitter is relatively straight forward in that it works in the same way whether you’re tweeting as a person or a business, and the things that make a business worth following are broadly the same as for personal profiles.

Facebook on the other hand is very different for businesses to individuals, it's more complicated, and in many cases Facebook is less useful than Twitter because of the way people use it.

To work out whether to bother with any social networking platform you need work out how your audience use it.

There are two ways of promoting businesses on Facebook: paid-for ads, and Company Pages…

Facebook advertising

This has the potential to be brilliant because adverts are displayed based on all the information that Facebook knows about the viewer, which is a lot more than most other advertising services. But something is amiss, because Facebook knows I’m married but still chooses to show me adverts for dating services.

The adverts that appear in the right column are generally not too offensive, and very occasionally something might appear that I’m actually interested in, and I might click it. But it’s mostly rubbish, so it becomes very easy to ignore that part of the page.

It's also possible to have paid-for ads appear in the main news stream panel, but personally I find this intensely annoying and do nothing to improve my opinion of the advertiser.

Company pages

Company pages, on the other hand, can be rather good. The idea is that you create a profile for your business that’s a lot like a personal profile, but instead of viewing being by strictly by mutual agreement, your company page is public and anyone can click to ‘like’ it. Then you can post updates straight to your "fans'" news streams in amongst pictures of their friends’ children and videos of cats falling off things.

And I think it can work rather well: barely a lunchtime passes without me declaring to myself that I must have at least one new guitar / amplifier / similar thing that would result in a cross wife.

But here’s the thing: my research suggests that people can be quite reluctant to click ‘like’. Check out this list of most popular pages and there's a clear trend: Facebook is primarily about interacting with friends, so a lot of people to ‘like’ a product or company, it has be relevant to that part of their lives – their social, cultural life; fun.

I checked the theory for myself by looking at a relatively diverse sample of my Facebook contacts’ ‘like’ lists: whilst some are more reticent with the like button than others, I saw virtually no likes that were to do with peoples' professional lives – after all, that’s what LinkedIn is for. So I suspect that if you’re selling B2B Facebook is probably not right for you.

What about B2C? Well, 99% of the things I spend money on I don’t care about enough to allow into my Facebook stream, and looking at the things other people 'like', it's pretty much exclusively things that they care about in their private lives. If that’s you and your product, it’s definitely worth doing and really engaging with. If not, I think you'd be better off concentrating your efforts elsewhere. Want to know where? Ask your audience, or ask us to help.