Facebook remains the giant among all the social networking sites. Whether you’re an employee, an executive, or a small business owner, it’s practically essential that you establish your presence on Facebook or you’ll be missing out on one of the best ways to promote your brand and engage with your audience.
Changes are inevitable though, which is why Facebook continues to roll out changes to its site that some people embrace while others resent. As a manager of your personal or small business brand, you may not be happy with these changes, but it is important that you understand them and how best to use them in your branding campaign.
Give us the best practices with Facebook’s new format and your concerns
These were the questions recently posted during #brandchat, a weekly conversation on Twitter all about every aspect of a brand and brand development.
Some of the concerns:
• Conversations are harder to find making it easy for you to miss someone’s comment or post on your wall
• It takes more clicking to get around the new Timeline making it somewhat cumbersome
Some of the best practices:
Activate the subscribe button in your Facebook timeline so that people can subscribe to your status posts and updates without you being required to add them as a friend.
You also need to evaluate how you’re telling your brand story in the new Facebook timeline. Choose dates and important milestone, and tell your story in a way that engages and interests your target client.
The real time-tracker also helps you see recent posts, updates, and interactions by your friends. This is a great way to see what your audience is currently talking about. This helps you engage and interact with them better – you can even click on the update and reply directly there.
Even if you represent a large business brand, people enjoy interacting with something with a face, not a business. Your personality shines through in your posts and updates, and this enables you to engage with the audience personally and professionally.
Facebook and your Facebook business page
As a small business owner, being on Facebook can help you really connect and engage with your customers. Here’s where you can talk and interact with them, update them on your promotions and sales, and even give them customer support. The more personal your interaction with your audience, the better for your small business brand.
Similar to personal pages, Facebook has recently converted brand pages as well to the Facebook timeline. Here are some best practices:
• Turn on the ability for people to message you. For the first time, “pages” can speak as the business or page they represent. In the past, in order to message a person privately, a person representing a business or their business would have to reveal who they personally are and take a chance messaging someone in hopes they wouldn’t report them for ‘spam’ since they don’t really know who they are.
• Customize your app icons at the top of the page (under the timeline cover photo) to brand yourself visually.
• Really strengthen you About section to tell your story, your mission and share your other sites (i.e. your blog, twitter link, LinkedIn profile, etc.)
Embrace the changes and share your best practices here, too!
Author:
Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog, CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks.com – a word of mouth marketing firm. She helps create connection, credibility, community and cha-ching through mobile marketing and social commerce around your brand. She is co-founder of #brandchat – a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding.
