Facebook
Currently, Facebook is the dominant social networking site, and it has the most features useful to the social
media marketer. It began in universities, so Facebook boasts a commanding percentage of college students
as members. Recently, however, its fastest growing segment has been users older than 35, and recent data
suggests that the 35–54 age group has become bigger than the 18–24 age group. For these older users,
Facebook presents a middle ground between the stuffiness of LinkedIn and the adolescent playground of
MySpace, and is a fun but easily navigable place where they can reconnect with old friends.
Pages
Facebook allows businesses to create public profiles that have many of the same features as a user’s
profile. Users can connect with a page and become fans. Pages can have public messaging walls, events,
photos, and custom applications. Nearly every company engaged in social media marketing should have a
Facebook page; it can often serve as a central place for the integration of other parts of a campaign.
One of the most popular pages on Facebook is the Coca-Cola page, yet it wasn’t even created by the
company itself. A Coke fan in Los Angeles made the page featuring little more than a giant can of soda, and
in a few weeks it had 250,000 fans. At the time of this writing, it has more than 3.5 million fans. Facebook
noticed the size of the group and asked Coca-Cola corporate to take it over, but the soda company’s marketing
team demonstrated its social media savvy and didn’t charge in and strong-arm the original creator
out of the picture. Instead, it assigned a team of people to help him maintain the page. If you go to that
page today and post a comment such as “Pepsi is better than Coke,” Coca-Cola corporate lets it stay. The
best social media marketing is always going to be done by your fans, not by you, so get out of their way.
When you’re setting up a page for your business, you can use a few applications to make the page
more interesting to visitors and make them more likely to return.
Currently, Facebook is the dominant social networking site, and it has the most features useful to the social
media marketer. It began in universities, so Facebook boasts a commanding percentage of college students
as members. Recently, however, its fastest growing segment has been users older than 35, and recent data
suggests that the 35–54 age group has become bigger than the 18–24 age group. For these older users,
Facebook presents a middle ground between the stuffiness of LinkedIn and the adolescent playground of
MySpace, and is a fun but easily navigable place where they can reconnect with old friends.
Pages
Facebook allows businesses to create public profiles that have many of the same features as a user’s
profile. Users can connect with a page and become fans. Pages can have public messaging walls, events,
photos, and custom applications. Nearly every company engaged in social media marketing should have a
Facebook page; it can often serve as a central place for the integration of other parts of a campaign.
One of the most popular pages on Facebook is the Coca-Cola page, yet it wasn’t even created by the
company itself. A Coke fan in Los Angeles made the page featuring little more than a giant can of soda, and
in a few weeks it had 250,000 fans. At the time of this writing, it has more than 3.5 million fans. Facebook
noticed the size of the group and asked Coca-Cola corporate to take it over, but the soda company’s marketing
team demonstrated its social media savvy and didn’t charge in and strong-arm the original creator
out of the picture. Instead, it assigned a team of people to help him maintain the page. If you go to that
page today and post a comment such as “Pepsi is better than Coke,” Coca-Cola corporate lets it stay. The
best social media marketing is always going to be done by your fans, not by you, so get out of their way.
When you’re setting up a page for your business, you can use a few applications to make the page
more interesting to visitors and make them more likely to return.
