4 Ways Businesses Sabotage Themselves On Facebook

Are you sabotaging your own brand on Facebook?

You wouldn’t do it intentionally, but what about unintentionally? Are you following the rules and best practices?

If you aren’t utilizing Social Media correctly, it tells your customers and potential customers that you either don’t know what you’re doing, that you really don’t care about your brand, or both.

Here are some of the mistakes I see a lot of businesses making:

1. Using a Facebook Personal Profile rather than a Business Page – Not a week goes by when I don’t get a “friend” request from some local business on Facebook. And these days I always reject them. Why? Because it is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service. Personal Profiles are for individuals while Business pages are for…businesses! Unfortunately, Facebook no longer allows you to convert a profile into a page, so you literally have to start from scratch.

2. Running contests improperly on your page - Facebook’s Contest and Promotion rules are very clear. You can NOT run a contest on your wall tab. A contest can’t be based on number of fans or require commenting as a condition of entry. The only way to “legally” run a contest on Facebook is to get Facebook’s permission in advance, and go through a paid third-party application. You can read more about this on our post Facebook’s Contest Rules Hurt Small Businesses.

The good news is that all of the conditions above can be taken care of by most third-party apps, and some can be quite affordable, like Wildfire.

Now here’s the real problem.

I’m assuming your brand is important to you. I’m assuming that you take a lot of time working on your advertising, product development, customer service, etc.

But if you have an improper page as in point #1, or are running an improper contest as in point #2…you are putting your brand and all your hard work at risk. Facebook has the right to shut your page down. And they will. When you sign up for Facebook or utilize any of their services, you are agreeing to their Terms of Service. And, like most anything else, we generally don’t read the small print. But in this case we need to.

Let’s say you’ve built up a community of 2,000 friends over the course of a year or two. If it is on a personal profile, and not a business, or “fan”, page, you could be shut down, and have to start over from scratch. And the same goes for improper contests and promotions.

Are you willing to risk all your work, and your brand, for something like this?

And here are two more problems I see:

3. Approaching Facebook as just another web page - I see this all the time. Very few updates. Merely cross posting with Twitter or some other social property. In this case, you’re merely duplicating all of your efforts in various places. And if I go to your page and your last update was a month or more ago, I feel like you don’t care. Either about me or your brand.

4. Ignoring the “social” in Social Media – By this I mean merely spewing out information without allowing for dialogue. Many businesses don’t even monitor their social properties to know when someone is talking to them or trying to get an answer to a question. To me, this shows that you don’t really care and don’t understand the functionality of Social Media.

Whether you are running your Social Media program in-house or hiring an outside firm, it is your responsibility to make sure everything is done properly to protect your brand.

Are you doing everything you need to to ensure your brand’s reputation?

Tagged as: customer service, facebook, Marketing, Online Communities, Social Media, Twitter