How you manage your Facebook presence really depends on your brand. That was the takeaway from today’s session titled “Why Facebook Should be an Essential Ingredient in Your Marketing” at MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Forum.
The panel featured some heavyweights of social media, including Adam Brown, director of Social Media at Dell; Kyle Flaherty, director of Marketing at BreakingPoint Systems; Frank Eliason, senior vice president of Social Media for Citi; and Ekaterina Walter, Social Media Center for Excellence strategist at Intel.
The need to establish presence on Facebook is obvious. The number of registered users on the social networking site is above 600 million.
But the size of your business can impact how you approach engaging with people on Facebook.
Take the plight of the small company. With fewer resources in hand, there’s less investment you can put into your Facebook presence. Big enterprises can afford to spend more on the features Facebook offers to extend your reach, such as ads. And you probably don’t have the same amount of time and staff dedicated to maintaining, growing, and designing your page. Advantage: Large enterprises.
But, little friend, you probably don’t have nearly as many headaches as the big brands do. Frank Eliason mentioned during the discussion that, when he first joined Citigroup, every tweet had to go through a large team of people. Sometimes, it took 24 hours to respond to a customer’s tweet about the brand. That approach has changed, Frank said, but Facebook posts still go through the legal team.
Then there are the consolidation issues. Dell is full of all kinds of entrepreneurs, Adam Brown said. That’s a good thing. But before Dell jumped onto Facebook in a coordinated way, employees and others had created about 60 different Dell-related pages, some about products, and others about various departments. A big initiative of Dell’s for the past year has been to consolidate those multiple pages, so their messaging isn’t diluted.
So when it comes to resources large enterprises have the obvious advantage. But smaller companies are more nimble, free to jump into the fray, and get conversations started without contacting General Counsel.
What holds true for both small and large brands is that anyone can do it. As Kyle Flaherty put it: “This isn’t rocket science.” The important thing is not to get discouraged by a lack of staff at a startup or a plethora of opinion at a big enterprise.
Bonus Tips From the Panel:
- Getting your messages into fans newsfeeds is dependent on Facebook’s algorithm. Facebook takes into account the number of likes and comments---the general engagement---attributed to your posts. If you find after 24 hours your message hasn't gained any traction, consider deleting it and re-posting later in a different way.
- Is it better to upload video to YouTube and then post it on Facebook? Or is it better to just upload the footage to your Facebook page? YouTube obviously offers greater spread. But, according to Ekaterina Walter, when you upload directly to Facebook, people who view it can “like” your video and your brand as well. That can result in more fans engaged with future content.
