Companies don’t need Facebook Pages anymore (Part 1)

20 years ago companies were on the fence as to whether or not they needed a web site. (The laggards are still catching up.) Today the ‘social’ pressure is back on, this time it’s all about Facebook.

Should your company put up a (or yet, another) Facebook page? No! That’s so yesterday.

You don’t need a Facebook page in order to grow a Facebook following. I suggest you focus your resources on acquiring and cultivating Facebook fans on your own sites instead. Actually, Facebook encourages you to go off-deck and do just that.

Confused?

Let me explain. First of all, companies can still put up a page on Facebook, a.k.a. “Fan Page” and there are at least a couple great reasons to do so:

• Once a visitor “Likes” your page, their action is broadcasted to their friends, who consequently may end up “Liking” (become Fans of) your page as well.
• Fans, by virtue of their affinity to your page, are now addressable by the page owner. Updates you post to your page’s wall will also be pushed to your Fans newsfeeds.

This is a direct marketer’s dream: not only do Facebook users typically check their Facebook page more often than their email, but once a message appears in their newsfeed – it becomes easily sharable with friends.

The problem with Facebook Pages

As any experienced Facebook marketer knows, optimizing Facebook Pages is not straightforward. In fact, it’s more like a straight jacket.

• Pages offer little real estate for brands to showcase their diversity of products and services and truly represent the entire brand.
• While tabs can be populated with custom content, functionality and designs, only a few tabs are visible at any time.
• Updates sent to the page’s Fans must be one-size-fits all. You can’t target based on customer type or interests. Imagine a retailer that sells both dishwashers and organic meat, among other things. If the retailer publishes an update targeting organic food lovers, they risk getting “unliked” by a large group of Fans (such as non-foodies) who might feel spammed. What’s a marketer to do?

3rd party solutions to the rescue?

Numerous 3rd party solutions exist to help marketers overcome some of these challenges. Typically these solutions involve employing some kind of specialized content management tool that allow for the creation and management of multiple, unique Facebook pages for every sub-brand, product, promotion and even local-markets. The benefit of these solutions is that many pages can be centrally managed, allowing content and design to be updated across multiple pages with one ‘click’.

But are multiple pages on Facebook really the right solution? Facebook users who search for a brand might end up with too many options, making it confusing to know where they are “supposed” to go. So to combat confusion, many of these ‘managed’ pages contain replicated content so that the user will feel at ‘home’ wherever they end up.

If you think this sounds less than perfect, it is. But it’s how marketers have created lemonade out of lemons.

A better solution

However, as I stated in the beginning of this post, there is a better solution: Acquire and cultivate Facebook fans on your own web sites instead. Believe it or not, that’s now what Zuckerberg is urging companies to do.

And that will be the topic of my next post called Companies don’t need Facebook Pages anymore (Part 2)