CCG Business Briefing: How to use facebook more effectively
November 7th, 2010 | 
Author: Introduction
- If facebook was a country it would be the fourth largest country in the world.
- More people play Farmville than live in Britain.
At the CCG Business Briefing on social media last week Nicola Erlich explained that facebook have recently changed how they work.
Users of facebook may want to react to these changes to make their use of facebook more effective.
Accounts
facebook have recently changed how they work.
There are now three types of accounts. These accounts have different uses and different rules. They are individual, group and page. Page is such an awkward name, I’m going to call them fan pages.
Individual
There are individual accounts like my personal account Rob Humphries
These are for people to interact with their friends, share pictures or play games. There is a maximum size of 5000 friends on an individual account.
Group
There are group accounts like the Stephen Lloyd-Morgan Group
Facebook want you to use groups so you can communicate with subsets of your friends or fans. If you are in a facebook group you are a member of that group.
When facebook set up groups they wanted a company or organisation to use groups to connect with their fans. Facebook has changed their ideas on this since.
Having a group now gives you access to some new powerful functions that you can use to help you interact with your members, including the ability to chat with all of them simultaneously.
http://www.facebook.com/groups/
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=434691727130
Fan Page
This is the confusingly named new type of account. This is for an organisation, business, band or celebrity to connect with their fans in an official, public way. Membership size is umlimited.
If you click on LIKE on a facebook page you become a fan of that page
http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages?ref=ts&v=app_7146470109
A while back someone changed my dj site into a fan page and I now have some fans. http://www.facebook.com/help/#!/pages/Rob-DJ-robROCKSthehousecom/43507816730
I would like more fans as I’m about 21,983,780 behind Lady Gaga.
Lady Gaga has 21,983,816 fans.
Facebook Rules
facebook has a reputation for changing its rules on an almost daily basis and for being very strict.
If you promote your business using an individual account and facebook receive one complaint from a user they reserve the right to close that account and ban the user from facebook.
They can also temporarily ban you from using the site, or restrict your options,
Many organisations will have very muddled situations with regard to facebook.
It must make sense to review this and try to simplify how you work with facebook because it’s not going to go away anytime soon.
- Rob is a DJ playing at events in Southern Spain and is interested in online marketing.
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Hi Rob,
Glad you enjoyed the seminar.
You have understood the differences brilliantly.
It is also worth adding 2 points
1. Facebook pages are indexed by search engines and are public
2. Facebook apps (applications) are a great way to personalise Fan Pages, (almost like having a website within Facebook) and enhance the fans experience.
If you need any help setting up fan pages or require a consultation please contact nicky@1on1consultancy.com
Great article and I am glad you were able to benefit from the CCG Business Briefing. Already several participants have written to me to say they were inspired by our seminar and they have been trying the tools we disccussed. Let me know how you get on and I would love to know if it helps your business.
The last para is the key one for me:
“Many organisations will have very muddled situations with regard to facebook”
It’s so true, and the challenge for businesses is to have a strategy for how to get a decent return on their time invested in social media generally – something they can only do with a clear strategy.