Why Sometimes Your Face Doesn’t Fit

Dan Clifford, director at Haslimann Taylor, writes:

Hurry up, there’s a bandwagon rolling and we all need to be on it – it’s the corporate craze of setting up Facebook pages and it is clearly too good an opportunity to miss.

Don’t worry too much if your brand doesn’t have much (if any) of an audience on the platform, and there is no need to bother yourself with trifling matters such as what content will populate your page, what interest it will hold for potential ‘friends’ and how you will keep it fresh and interesting.

I am, of course, joking. But have a scout round Facebook and you will find any number of awkward corporate looking pages posing as social networking enthusiasts in a cunning ruse to recruit new customers and become a communicative brand.

It highlights one of the bizarre knee jerk reactions that has come out of the immense success of online marketing – that as soon as something new is declared a success everyone must leap in with both feet or regret it forever.

And it’s bizarre because it wouldn’t happen with any other kind of media. You wouldn’t find an upmarket chain of hotels scrambling to get themselves into a lads mag or a top end car company putting pressure on their marketing team to secure them space in a teen title – but being wide of the mark on a social networking site can appear just as awkward as these examples.

Of course, there are many brands that offer a great fit for sites like Facebook, they have things that they can regularly update their Facebook Fans on, they need, appreciate and use the feedback they receive – and most importantly all parties get something useful from the page.

So the message is this – just because it’s social networking doesn’t mean you don’t need to look before you leap. If your brand has a big potential audience on the platform, you have enough interesting/fun/insightful things to share without having to manufacture them, you can give people something they wouldn’t get anywhere else and they can genuinely interact with you then it sounds good – if not then don’t just board the bandwagon.