Whats funny is, if you think of Facebook as simply being the few friends you have that interact with your posts, FB is actually working great. If you think of it as an opportunity to make friends with your friends friends over time, slowly, it can sorta do that too. Wanna share pictures and memes and family stuff and life stuff with the few dozen people who could possibly care? Build the number up to a few hundred, or maybe 1000? FB works pretty well; if you dont mind reeducating yourself on the privacy policies every few months with your bags packed, ready to flee if some things upset you greatly. The problem is, people think FB is business activity too, and, if you arent a major brand, IE, if you dont have 100s of thousands or millions of customers, it isnt. Heres the thing about, well, consumer reality. 100 fans dont matter. 1000 fans pretty much dont matter. 10,000 fans is a hobby. You need somewhere around 100,000 fans to make a living at something, minimum, and numbers in the millions are required for any kind of security. Your mileage may vary. I have a twitter friend who writes a ton of social media and a ton of prose, writes and indypubs 4 books a year, which she sells for 20 bucks a pop to her 1000 fans… and she gives them away free too, to try to grow that social media base. (Her 1000 fans hide among her 20,000 twitter followers, by the way; her raw number isnt 1000.) She provides life-coach like inspirational messages and follow-my-lead type postings. I have to wonder how many people read her books; English is her second language. Of course, how many people read the Serious Novels they buy and shelve to look Serious? Who knows. Shes pretty good actually, her stuff has a lot of force and spirit in it. She makes a living writing… with twitter. Not FB. Because twitters doesnt sell your users back to you. (Watch the video to explain what this means, if you dont already.) FB is just another cost of doing business for most small business, one that will never yield any significant benefits but which you ignore at your own peril, as it can cost you customers, at the same time as it wont help you--which is nuts, how is that even possible, but that seems to be the case. You need to have the FB page AND the website AND the twitter account and yeah, mostly, theyll do nothing, but if you have them so people will stop telling you they need them and feeling like youre idiot for not having them. Ive experimented with boosted posts, and for five dollars I can get another 1000 views, and push 10 or 20 people from an FB post to my website, where admittedly, there is little to buy, but, you know, nothing happens. Five bucks for ten people would never work is suspect for a writer of anything but pyramid scheme products. It does make me think that the place to build a social media following is twitter and/or Youtube, with links back to you own site, with some sort of auto feed to FB. Engaging with people here is stupid from a business perspective. Even if you were a business, I think youd want to just transplant any meanginful engagement to your web and twitter feeds, because say, if there was some cool thing that emerged from an client interaction on your wall--youd have to pay money to get that interaction pushed out to everybody. You paid to get it by having the engagement in the first place, and now you have to pay to show that off? Its really really annoying. Oh, I suppose Gplus is something to consider too.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 17:26:24 +0000
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