Facebook is your personal Internet address; are you home?
Not every individual needs a Web site or a blog, but everyone should have a home address on the Internet. Facebook has exploded over the last few years as the location of choice.
I believe it’s important to think of Facebook as your home address and act accordingly. Facebook is a place to keep up with friends, family and associates. Invite anyone you would like to keep up with, enjoy having over for tea or to your office for good conversation.
It is true that some people abuse their guests with quick pitches and multi-level marketing opportunities. Just like the offline world, people with poor taste and timing often find themselves lonely.
You don’t have to open your door to everyone. Set the ground rules in your profile. My personal Facebook home account is wide open to my community with the condition that community members understand that this where I share a lot of personal thoughts. I talk about my family, share photographs, talk a little politics and share career news. If members are more interested in a business relationship I suggest Linkedin or Twitter for New Media Photographer content.
Is Facebook a waste of Time?
Yes, if you respond to every status update, share every detail of your day or play the time-consuming games such as Farmville or Mafia Wars. Facebook can take just a few moments of your day with a few status updates. With a quick scan of recent friend activity you may take an extra five minutes to respond to the most interesting news, comments, photos, videos or links.
No social media site needs to dominate your days. Set personal rules and follow them.
Pages vs. Groups
Technically you should have only one Facebook account. Business owners are wise to consider a Facebook presence for their companies. Fortunately, Facebook offers two options.
When it comes to promoting brands, companies and personalities, a Facebook page is the way to go. First, there is no limit on the number of fans you can have. The walls come down for pages and they are open for indexing by search engines.
Every time you post to your page it is displayed on your followers’ pages. So, if you have 1,000 fans, your announcements are distributed to a 1,000 Facebook pages.
Facebook groups are good for organizations, clubs and special projects. They offer unique setup and administrator controls. Like the standard Facebook page, a group is a closed community. In my opinion, the No. 1 advantage of a Facebook group is the fact that the administrator can send an e-mail to each of the group members. But, unlike pages, the distribution is limited to 5,000 members.
Is Facebook effective?
If you are looking to connect with family and friends, Facebook is a great place to hang out. Many of my connections are people I’ve lost touch with in the last 20 years. So, I don’t find it necessary to communicate every day. If they’ve waited this long, a couple days without an update will not hurt anyone.
If you plan on using Facebook to combine personal and business life or to drive traffic to your Web sites, I would recommend submitting more updates to keep the signal to noise ratio down. It’s important to avoid having most of your status updates look like sales pitches.
Although standard Facebook accounts can work for commercial photographers, my recommendation would be to focus on developing an effective Facebook page.
I know a number of business owners who are using Facebook effectively. Take advantage of the photo tagging options; it can be an effective tool in driving traffic to your Facebook address. It is highly recommended to have a plan and a set of personal guidelines on how you use this social media platform.
Remember, Facebook is your home address on the Net and it may be a while before it will be time to move. Use this valuable real estate wisely.
Hey Rosh!
Interesting post! I definitely agree with some of your points – pages dominated by sales pitches get on everyone’s nerves and are eventually ignored by many, and it is important that business contacts understand that personal information will be shared and vice versa for personal contacts. I also like that you use the real estate metaphor to help users understand the importance of propriety on their pages.
However, you seem to imply that personal and professional “real estate” are mutually exclusive on Facebook, and that anyone using Facebook as a tool to promote their business “abuse their guests” and have “poor taste and timing” and with these statements I must respectfully disagree. Part of keeping up with “friends family and associates” is letting everyone know what is happening in both our personal and our professional lives! Done properly, these updates convey excitement and pride – neither of which I find issue with and actually I feel it allows me to share in their victory! You also single out MLM as a particular nuisance on Facebook I wanted to speak to that briefly.
MLM is one of many available business models today – just like franchising 50 years ago, it is seen by some as controversial and even subversive! I would argue that it’s just one more way of doing business, and in America I am all for additional ways of achieving success and happiness!
I can appreciate the possibility for users to abuse this “real estate” and thank you for ideas and insight for using Facebook to it’s greatest potential!
Kindest Regards,
Candace Evans
It all depends on how you do it. There is a big difference between educating and hard selling people already sold on you.