Tuesday, April 29, 2008
- Tim Wall
Lately, I've been working a lot on Facebook, exploring its usefulness as a marketing tool and a part of our company's brand. Some may think that I'm way behind the times, but I would disagree. I think that Facebook is just now getting to the point of potentially becoming valuable to businesses. For it to truly come into its own, it needs to overcome some of its awkwardness, particularly in it's "pages" interface, which is where most businesses and brands would find their fit.
While Facebook is pre-configured right out of the box to quickly get people up and running with their profiles, it really takes quite a bit of exploring, research, and configuring to get things working on a Facebook page. First, you have to figure out that pages are available and that you want one. But then comes the somewhat maddening task of customizing that page through applications that will do what you want them to do. In our case, I want our Facebook page to aggregate all of the activity our company puts out on the web through other channels. So, for example, I'd like to have our blog feed brought into our page.
You'd think than an RSS feed reader would be a pretty standard application, and there are many to choose from. But of course, you have to find one that is trusted and dependable. So, you start searching and reading user reviews. But then, most applications on Facebook don't work on pages, only on profiles. So, you have to find the apps that do work on pages (few and far between) and I've not found any type of search feature to let me easily search only applications that work on pages.
I did finally find an RSS application. I installed it, configured it, and set it up. Then, I posted to the blog to see if it would work. After 16 hours, it still hasn't updated. So, in reading the forum for the app, I discover that it's very unreliable. So, I try another one. Again, set up, configure, and then try to make a post to test it (actually, this post is going to be my test). The process is cumbersome, and not helped by the fact that every time you need to navigate to your page, you have to click several times to get there, and Facebook is anything but snappy in its load times.
(sidenote: the built-in Facebook notes application does allow you to import blog posts from RSS feeds, and it's a lot easier to set up. But it only allows one feed and all of your posts are prefaced with "Element Fusion imported a note" which isn't really desirable)
I know this is a bit of a rant. Please excuse me as it's just what is on my mind currently. I do see potential value in Facebook for businesses out there, but at this point, it's hard to recommend the tool to others because of all that's required to utilize it effectively. You can bet that as I continue to uncover more things that work, I will share them here and hopefully save someone from the effort I've been going through to get things working well. In the meantime, if you have any insights to share about using Facebook for business, please do so in the comments.
PS. I can say that the TwitterSync application really has worked well for us. Not only that, but the developer was right on with timely support when I needed it. So, that one's a winner!