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And, no sooner do you think you’ve got it all figured out, but some other young upstart comes along and says there’s a new social media site you should be promoting your business on.
While the Web was invented to make our life easier, these days it’s so complicated that what used to be a case of switching on your PC over morning coffee to check your e-mail has turned in to a major chunk of your day being used up finding out what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter, trying to figure out whether Google+ really is the future, finding out what interesting websites your network have shared via StumbleUpon and looking at the stats on your website’s blog to see if anybody’s left any comments worth responding to.
It can leave one feeling rather breathless, and means you have to get up an hour earlier than you used to just to find out what happened since you logged off at 11pm.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently travelling around small businesses, specifically pubs, helping them make sense of the why’s and wherefore’s of social media, which site is best for them and how to improve the experience for their customers.
One thing has jumped out at me more than anything else when doing so: most have a Facebook presence of one form or another but, sadly, it’s set up in such a way that customers can’t easily find it, it’s difficult to manage and, most importantly, no analysis can be made of its use. Unfortunately, it may also be a breach of Facebook’s user Terms & Conditions.
Hands up if you have a Facebook presence for your pub. Good. Now hands up if you have that set up as a ‘Page’, or a ‘User Profile’. I’m going to guess that many of you just stuck your hand up in answer to the Profile question, because that seemed to be the logical one to do at the time you decided to get all social networky, and Pages just seemed confusing.
User Profiles are specifically for individuals to have their own space on Facebook. It’s where they can share detailed stories about what they had for dinner last night or discuss the fact that Phil Schofield and Holly Willoughby had a man who looked like Sir Stirling Moss on the This Morning program yesterday demonstrating suitable, ahem, positions for the over-sixties. Daytime TV has clearly come on a long way…
What Facebook doesn’t want businesses doing is using Profiles for their business presence; they want to try and keep such frivolities away from the users and so, instead, set up Pages. Profiles are quite restrictive for businesses and make it difficult for most people to find when simply browsing for your business; Pages, on the other hand, allow you to make your social networking space public and searchable. You can create adverts that can be targeted to your specific audience. Users who visit your premises will be able to ‘check-in’ to your page on Facebook when they visit your establishment, and you will be able to use Facebook Insights to track how your Page is being used, which stories you post have been of use and interest to people and give you a general understanding of what is happening when people follow you online. You don’t get the same sort of statistical information with a user Profile.
There are a whole host of benefits open to you using Facebook’s Page service over Profiles that I don’t have the space to detail here. Suffice it to say it’s free, and easy to set up. As long as you have a personal User Profile simply go to your Facebook account and, on the left, select Pages. From there, you’ll be offered to the option to Create A New Page, and the rest is simply a case of following the on-screen instructions, allowing you to set up a new page for your business and start promoting yourself as you see fit.
Search for your premises’ Place Page (typically, this will be somewhere on Facebook already) and click the link to merge it with your new business Page so that when users check-in the statistics match up.
And voila! You’re good to go, with a proper business Page, statistical analysis of use, and a specific page you can link to on all your traditional media, such as menus or local press adverts.
Mark Daniels is the licensee of The Tharp Arms in Chippenham, Cambs.
