B2B SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
You may be aware of Facebook Business Pages. These are pages that may be set up by businesses (sort of – more later) to make information about the business available online. Facebook Business Pages are relatively easy to set up, and (in our view) that may be their biggest advantage.
A number of businesses have experimented with Facebook Business Pages, but we feel the results achieved are generally sub-optimal due to several factors.
First, Facebook is an incredibly strong brand…in the consumer world. The businesses who have the greatest success are consumer brands – B2C not B2B. Facebook is strongly associated with non-business socializing and with consumers “identifying” with a brand as part of lifestyle choice, lifestyle positioning and personal identity issues. An example is consumers choosing sides in the cola wars, publicizing their choice online with passionate arguments about their reasons.
For most people evaluating a B2B social media approach, this is hardly a serious issue. In short business people generally look at Facebook as more of a pastime than a serious location to obtain serious information. Basically Facebook may be lacking in business-to-business credibility and may in fact increase the risk of trivializing to some extent the importance of your brand.
More importantly however are the notoriously onerous terms of service, or TOS for short. First you will need a team of lawyers to understand what is currently in the TOS. Do you control your posted content? Can Facebook use it for other purposes? Can you take it down if you want to or if an admin posts something unflattering? And we say “currently” because the TOS are always changing, sometimes quite dramatically.
An example of the challenges related to the TOS is that as of this writing, Facebook requires a business page to be associated with a personal profile. What if the personal profile is somehow linked to unsavory material/comments/behaviors etc? Worse is that the personal profile owner has full admin rights to the page in perpetuity. What if they leave on unhappy terms? According to the TOS the primary admin can never be changed or reassigned. And they can delete all secondary admins and use the site in malicious ways!
Facebook we feel can certainly be used but mainly as a linking tool to your valuable content in another location.
On the other hand if you are a quite small business on an extremely limited budget, it may be a place to start.
