Using Facebook is in NO way a set it and forget it effort. Many seem to believe that if you “build it, they will come”. This may work in location based apps as seen from our post “if you build it, they will check in“, but it does not work for other social media efforts, especially Facebook Fan Pages.
Participation on Facebook includes 2 major areas of commitment in order to succeed. This translates into dedicating sufficient headcount to both developing content and to actually participating.
When you decide to start a Facebook fan page, you must consider the individuals that need to be involved. Depending on your goals and objectives for you fan page, this may be able to be done with one person or a team. Once objectives and strategies are laid out, you will have a clearer picture on what this job will entail. If you are going for 2 updates per day and 3 conversations per week, well then one person can handle that. If you want 5 status updates per day, 2 photo albums per week, 3 videos per week, 5 conversation per week, and 50 new people who “like” your page… then you obviously need more than one person. Of course this is unless you have hired a person to ONLY run your social media efforts.
The next thing is actually participating. This is social networking… “NETWORKING”. Facebook was created to be social. Let others know what you are doing and comment and converse about your actions and your fans’ actions. This will create a down to earth, person-to-person type of relationship. This creates loyalty and actually knowing who your customers are.
We can now look at both of these together and determine how much time and support this is going to need. Its a general rule of thumb that you should spend half of your time creating content and half of your time networking. If you think your team can dedicate 5 hours per week to facebook. Then 2 1/2 hours goes to content and 2 1/2 hours goes to networking.
Now, I may be jumping the gun hear if the employees are ready to jump into Facebook but management is not supporting it. You need the support of your management team so that they can be the ones to officially lay out goals and objectives. It would also be a good idea for management to establish company guidelines for employee participation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
Does your companies Facebook fan page have sufficient support? Is your management behind the objectives of your companies use of social media? Or do you think Facebook doesn’t need this much attention?
