How Far Will Your Facebook Fanpage Go? Part I
Dec
Big brand, small brand, famous celebrity, little-known name, everyone has a Facebook fan page. After all its not a tough feat – sign up, post a few pics, add a bio and ta-daa! you have a page.
Problem is, that’s not all it takes.
Social media marketing is not just about creating an online presence. Its about creating a sustainable online presence. Sustainable being the operative word. TechCrunch blogged about this a few days ago – a report from Sysomos, a social media monitoring firm (covered here previously) has some dismal figures – 77% fanpages have less than 1,000 fans and only 4% have more than 10,000 fans.
Does this mean unless you’re a top-notch celebrity or a really BIG brand, you shouldn’t bother creating a fanpage? I don’t think its that simple. But it is an opportunity for every brand to ask itself some pertinent questions, namely:
- Is my target audience on Facebook?
- Does the product or service offer compelling, oft updated content for engagement?
- Are there resources available to carry this work on a sustainable basis?
- Are we technologically sound to make the most of Facebook’s platform?
Each of these is a critical question to ask before diving into the Facebook mania. If your target audience is indeed on Facebook, then you need to know if you, in turn have enough material to keep them enticed, entertained, amused, interested and engaged. If you can do that or are already doing it – ask yourself if you can do that tomorrow, next week, next month, next quarter and for a long time to come. Given the dynamic flow of information on Facebook, in order to stay top-of-mind (ToM) there needs to be someone dedicatedly working on this presence. Usually that resource is called a community manager, but names aren’t important. Roles are.
Then comes the technology bit. One big myth about social media is that it is solely about conversations (content). WRONG. It is as much, if not more about technology. Sure most social media sites – Facebook, Flickr, WordPress have made it very simple for laymen to get started on them, but in ordered to be mastered or made the most of, programming know-how goes a long way. Take the most popular Facebook fanpages – StarBucks, PizzaHut, Coca-Cola – all have leveraged Facebook’s FBML, fusing content, design and technology to make truly compelling pages.
While the statistics are gloomy, I believe that the fanpage may be the answer to small companies’ online conundrum. In fact if well created and maintained smaller brands with limited budgets and resources might not need a website at all. One of the many great things about Facebook is that it allows for a great deal of customization and is inherently viral.
More about this in my next blog post.
No related posts.
I agree with you on the importance and the need of FB fan pages. But online presence through fan pages are not the right attitude for most of the firms/brands. IMHO fan pages should only and only supplement your online presence through your websites or micro-sites. It should be used to re-direct traffic to your property.Technology should primarily be used to engage the users and similarly the content should be responsible for re-directing traffic.
Hi Pratik, thanks for writing in – always great to have a host of perspectives on the same topic. Yes, you’re right a facebook fanpage is not always the answer. From what I’ve observed, there have been too many half-hearted attempts at managing both a fanpage and a website. In the end, neither seems to do the trick. Based on brands’ objectives, sometimes a well created fanpage is all that’s needed. But like I said, it depends on what the brand wants to achieve from an online presence – clearly this won’t work for e-commerce or subscription-based businesses.
Great stuff as usual…