Facebook – do you Become a Friend or a Fan and what about a Group?

I have had a few questions around facebook from a couple of Club Managers so I thought it worthwhile to provide a quick summary in lamens terms.

Facebook.com is all about ‘connecting’ people through a community environment – and is referred to as social media.

Anyone can search people’s names online, without having their own ‘profile’ and see a pic of the person (if they have loaded one). In fact, you can even search by organization name, school name etc and it’s a great way of tracking down good friends that maybe you travelled through Europe with, but have now lost contact with for whatever reason.

To utilize the power of facebook though, you need to ‘join’ so that you can setup your own online ‘profile’. You can spend as little or as much time doing this as you please – but take it from me – it can be addictive and 5 minutes can quickly transcend into an hour. So…..your asking how can it assist my business? Here’s a quick summary of the various ways you can participate in facebook:

1. Setup a ‘profile’ for yourself (the idea of a profile is that you are an actual person, as opposed to a product or a business) – you connect with ‘friends’ who may be actual; friends, family, business collegues. Once you accept friends, they can see all of the content on your profile and vice versa, the idea being its two way communication built on trust. I have my own profile ‘Justine Turner Day’;

2. Setup a ‘group’ for your interest – can be anything eg. Save the Environment, Best Bands, Clubsational. Anyone with a facebook profile can search for a group based on keywords and ‘join’ if the group interests them ie become a ‘member’ of the group. The ‘group’ has their own profile page and can send out invitations to events and post information relating to the group directly to members;

3. Setup a ‘business’ page ie www.clubsational.com.au – so you ask how is this different to the two above. Well, again, as in ‘2’, anyone can ‘join’ (ie it is not based on being ‘accepted’) but you become a ‘fan’ (as opposed to a ‘friend’ (1) or a ‘member’(2)). From this page, the business can also run content ads across the site, similar to Adwords through Google. Of course, because the content is quite personal, the message can be targeted at the micro level.

Like anything, the power in using facebook and any social media interaction, is based on addressing:

1. Absolute relevance – to the target audience;
2. Community – feeling of ‘belonging’;
3. Involvement – engaging the audience with content;
4. Creative – making sure it doesn’t look like an ad;
5. Measurement – power of ROI.