It's Facebook's birthday. It makes its shareholders a lot of money and 3/4 million people do something there every day. So what does this mean for a business looking for a market?
It's true that if you are trying to compare Facebook with anything that went before, you end up scratching your head. As a phenomenon, it was genuinely new. Built to encourage people to share their daily lives, it has been massively successful by any standard.
But it presents a puzzle to businesses. After all, we can see there are a lot of people there, but what are they doing? We can see is that they are posting stuff, uploading images, engaging in the important and more banal stories of everyday life. Occasionally someone will post something interesting to everyone and not just to their family and friends, but how do you place your business amongst the acres of day-to-day conversation? There are occasions, of course, when Facebook can act as a force for real change, when it becomes an area that censors cannot reach, or generates surges of activity that would be a dream to any marketer. But even if we catch that moment and have something that will ride the particular wave, it becomes a moot point as to whether Twitter and video posting sites do this better.
That still doesn't help us much. At any given moment, the question for any business is how to turn a particular media space to their advantage and to attract people who would not otherwise find them through the normal search process. You need to know how you add customers and add value in the middle of this surge of activity.
You are the story
The important thing to realise is that "We are the story". So, you are not placing something in front of your audience as you would with a demonstration of a product in a shop, or an explanation of your services to a client. Facebook is about presenting content as if it was part of a day to day conversation. It's also about engaging with an audience who can choose to take notice or not. And, here is a new twist, your audience can decide they dislike you, or express disapproval of your message with comments that can be as hostile as they want. The comments might even be untrue, and you still cannot do anything about them. Suddenly you are faced by the fact that you have far less control of your creation than you do with your own website, your own PR and your own adverts. Posting and sustaining company comment on Facebook is like putting your head into the lion's mouth.
So here you are, as a business having to engage with your customers face to face, like a conversation, having to answer criticism sometime and having to make sure your voice appears on the radar of a user who is not searching for you, but is here busily engaged in their own conversation This has its limits for gaining business organically. So much so, that Facebook itself thinks that the organic game is up, which leaves us with just a few types of business that will benefit organically from using their pages
- Where there is a community connected with this sort of activity (as a business you can join the conversation that goes with being part of the community)
- Event driven businesses - Facebook and Twitter are fantastic for these
- Charities - they are embedded in the community by definition
- Local businesses, such as bars, restaurants, cafes, hairdressers and so on who can create an audience who they can then offer promotions and event details. Because they are embedded in the community, they can benefit from the wider community that is Facebook
- Brands who don't struggle for an identity: they just want to reinforce their existence
- Long-established Facebook companies that have a track-record of running promotions and making life exciting for their followers there
SME's looking to increase their Facebook leads need to bear all this in mind. Now that Facebook has itself indicated the declining value of organic listings, your choice is to pay up with a paid listing, or work so hard you won't have a lot of time for anything else.
Is Facebook still relevant?
Does that mean you should drop your Facebook listing? Far from it. If you keep your information up to date, the worst that can happen is that someone finds you there. As a minimum, you should go back to your listing from time to time and tend to the garden. Keep it fresh and up to date and avoid those nasty comments if ever they do come in.
Better still: put Facebook in a proper place for your business. Someone once described Facebook as having all the values of an addiction. We have no need for it, but we go there all the time even so. We see it as becoming more like the older version of some magazine. Its audience is changing, but they will still pick it up at the dentist while they are waiting. The constant desire of people to know what their friends and family are doing is something that businesses can take advantage of. If they are not doing it on Facebook, sure as heck they will be doing it on something similar.
And if your target market is middle-aged and relatively wealthy, then this age-group is still incrasing in numbers and using Facebook heavily. If you have ways of targeting this audience with relevant messages, paid for or organic, then youcan still benefit. That is always assuming, the platform does shoot itself in the foot again with another privacy mistake. This really would reduce its appeal and the rest of the world will move on to the next big thing.
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