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While lacking a Facebook page for your business is not necessarily the equivalent of trying to operate without a telephone and modern plumbing, social media is something almost no businesses can afford to be without. Social media like Facebook (FB) allows a business to connect directly with its consumer base. With a Facebook page, a business becomes more approachable, more personal, and more accessible. In short, it’s pretty awesome.
Before FB, businesses would often have to rely on press releases and advertising to get the word out about sales, product developments, anything of potential interest to customers. And compiling those press releases and adverts took time and money. But with Facebook, the amount of information a company can disseminate is only constrained by the number of times the person in charge of social media can hit the "Post" button.
But this ease of disseminating information, coupled with a lack of general FB etiquette, can become a problem as well. And some common FB behavior can have serious negative repercussions. Below are four offenses business FB pages commonly commit.
1. Overposting, or "HEY LISTEN TO ME, AGAIN"
As noted above, the only constraint to posting on a business FB page is the willingness, and stamina, of the poster. This can be a problem, because many a business has taken this ease as an invitation to try to break its own posting record every day. Every magnificent thought the FB poster thinks of is deemed essential knowledge the public most know, and is thus shouted from the Facebook rooftops with gusto.
What overposting does, though, is clog up users' news feeds. Your business’s postings become white noise. But more than that, they become an annoyance. They become SPAM.
And once one of your company’s "friends" or "followers" feel spammed by your page, they will do one of two things: hide the offending business from their feed, or just delete you from their list completely. And once the latter is done, the former follower is unlikely to ever reverse their decision.
How much is too much? Really, posting more than once or twice a day. More than that and you risk alienating your customers.
2. Oversharing
Oversharing is not overposting. Overposting is talking too much. Oversharing is talking too weird.
Oversharing is many things—treating the business’ FB page like your diary, or your therapist, or political soapbox, or really treating your company’s FB page as anything except the PR platform that it is.
Your business’s FB page is there to promote your business. If you like to inject a little personality into that promotion platform, bully to you. But there’s a fine line between "personality" and "personality crisis," and once you cross the line, your page is toast. People will hit the "hide postings from…" button faster than you can say "RON PAUL FOREVA!!!" (Oh, and turn the caps lock off, Mr. Shouty Pants. But you should know that already.)
3. Poor Writing
Many businesses cut a corner by either writing their FB (and other social media) content themselves or farming it out to an intern with questionable grammatical skills. With the first option, you certainly are cutting out middlemen. But you might be ending up with a FB feed that reads like the equivalent of the local old guy who owns the furniture store and does his own commercials. Unless that’s the aesthetic you’re going for, you might have somebody professional look it over.
And by professional, we don’t mean your textspeak-fluent "resident young person." Bad writing—that is, multiple misspellings, clunky prose, the aforementioned overuse of emoticons and abbreviation—could be making your FB page look informal, unprofessional, and overly… well, teenagerish. And nobody wants to patronize a business with the voice of "Uh, yeah, whatever" (unless that’s what you’re going for, doodert.)
4. Lack of Moderation
Your Facebook Wall is like your community bulletin board. So, unfortunately, lots of people are going to graffiti it up. Personal musings, links to their own dubious sites, pictures of Betty White in a swimsuit—whatever it is, random crud is inevitably going to clutter up your page. You have to stay diligent to keep your FB page spic-and-span. Otherwise, you run the risk of developing a FB page that is a place where law has no name.
While you don’t necessarily need to put a full-time hall monitor on your page, it’s an imperative to clean things up once in awhile and delete postings that don’t fit the necessities of your FB page.
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