Tuesday, May 6, 2008
- Tim Wall
I'm always very cautious about adding more effort to our company's marketing mix. It's very easy to start something that can't be sustained. If we're not careful, we can end up with blogs that never have posts added, or Facebook pages that are little more than a few fan photos. This is why I spent a lot of time evaluating Facebook before getting our company into it. Actually, I am still in the evaluation process, as we haven't made any official ties yet to our Facebook page. I may still determine that there isn't enough reward to justify the effort.
Leverage what you already have
However, I have increased the reward / effort ratio dramatically by using Facebook primarily as a mirror to other content that we are already creating. We already put a lot of energy into
our blog, so I simply publish our blog onto our Facebook page. Voila! Instant Facebook content. We've also recently added
Twitter as a company communications channel. The Facebook
TwitterSync application lets us synchronize our Facebook status with
our Twitter feed and publish all of our tweets onto our Facebook page. Again, more exposure with no added effort.
Facebook should be secondary
It's important to note in all of this that we are not originating any of our content in Facebook itself. Why would we? Sure, Facebook has 30 million users, but that's nothing compared to the total number of internet users. So, it makes sense to keep our marketing website the primary focus. This may seem like a simple point, but I think it's critical to understand. As I said in part one, Facebook isn't magic. It really doesn't offer anything new. It simply expands and enhances the reach of the efforts we already undertake.
One exception to this is with photos. I've started adding photos to Facebook directly. It would likely be more "pure" to add photos to Flickr, but I haven't quite seen the advantage of that yet. Having photos on Facebook gives you some cool functionality that can be of benefit, and there's no way to integrate that functionality seamlessly with Flickr. There are lots of Flickr Facebook apps, but none of them really do much more than just display a bunch of photos on your page. So, at least currently, I'm considering making Facebook the place to store some company photos. Of course, this is subject to change, and naturally, I will still store some photos on our primary website as well.
If it's just doubling content, why use it?
This is a practical question, and the answer goes back to my argument in part one. Facebook does have 30 million users, putting it, in my opinion, just on the brink of becoming something really powerful. If they can continue to build their user-base and improve their page support for companies and brands, then having a "presence" on Facebook is a worthwhile thing. But nothing says that presence has to be completely unique.
This is just like your company having a presence at a trade show or other function. Likely, the content shared at those functions is always the same, but having the presence in multiple places is a good way to promote the brand. By creating a Facebook page that mirrors content your company is producing anyway, you can establish a Facebook presence with minimal ongoing effort, making it more likely that your presence will sustain rather than fizzle.