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3 Reasons why brands and marketers should be wary of facebook

by Phil Barrett

Social media in Canada still starts with facebook. With nearly 1 in 3 Canadians on facebook, it represents a platform for brands and marketers to reach their targeted audience in unprecedented ways.

I’m a big proponent of extending campaigns or branding initiatives to facebook, but I get uncomfortable when I see some brands abandoning their own website in favour of a facebook only presence.

I get that profiles, pages (now called public profiles) and groups are all accessible and searchable now even if you aren’t registered on facebook – but here are three reasons why brands and marketers need to proceed with caution:

1) You have no control. Brands and marketers who spent time and money into building custom pages to bring their message alive in the context of the facebook platform woke up last week to see that their page was now a profile and that their ability to personalize the experience was reduced significantly. As a weak consolation prize we can now default to the ambiguous “boxes” tab and dump all our custom messaging in there.

Even Skittles who created epic levels of PR recently by redirecting all their product and information links to user generated websites (including facebook) still had a homepage that they could control and redirect as required. facebook can and will change how and what your branded page does without notice and without input from you.

If your agency did that to you, you’d fire them on the spot!

2) It’s difficult to reach your fans or “friends” from your public profile. Unlike groups, if you send an update to your fans, the message won’t appear in their inbox. They have to click on “updates” which is the last tab in your inbox. It’s not intuitive what that means for most users, and without an update indicator like you have with email (the number that appears above your inbox indicating how many new emails you have) there is no reason for people to really click there and search to see if you have an update.

There was great potential with the new page designs that make the home page a “status feed” like your own profile page, but even those updates are not accessible to your fans unless they click on “public profiles” from the newsfeed navigation – another FAIL for usability.

There needs to be an intuitive way for users to allow and select which updates appear in their feed – including branded public profiles

3) Once somebody has become a fan of your public profile, it’s very difficult for them to find your page again. It’s crazy that in order to find the CSIA Ontario page (as an example), I need to click to away from my status stream or homepage to my personal page then click on info, then scroll to the bottom of the page (where the pages are listed) and click next before I see the page i want to access and click on that.

Taking 4 clicks to reach relevant and popular content is a massive FAIL for usability again.

There needs to be an intuitive way for people to find their pages within 2 clicks maximum. Facebook will never have true group community (and the benefits to the social graph that come with it) until they address this problem.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of facebook as a marketing platform, but brands and marketers need to treat it like an extension of their overall strategy and not the entire focus.

  • Well said. I definitely have a lot of clients who think they MUST have a facebook page to survive. Nevermind that they need to understand what in the heck to do with a facebook page once they create it - facebook pages/groups/etc are NOT conducive to connecting with fans/friends/followers. You're spot on about notifications and even links to your groups being very inconspicuous. The really do need to make some adjustments. We'll see how quick they are to redesign again after this last phase.
  • Michael Nurse
    Like most shiny new marketing objects, Facebook and any other social media / user generated content needs to be a part of the marketing mix - not THE marketing mix...
  • I co-sign this.

    Change to custom pages was a step backwards from a Branding aspect

    FB did not take user navigation to preferred content into consideration with the new design. How effective is it once I join a fan page if it takes so much clicks to find the page again and if I am not notified properly about the update. Really puts a dent into trying to build a extended relationship with fan page members

    I hope FB reads into the feedback they are getting from users etc and fixes the usability issues in the next release.
  • Josh
    I 100% agree.

    I worked on the Heart and Stroke Barrie Chapter group, and four to five clicks later, I can finally get to it. In addition, All the public groups that I belong to now I don't have a clue whats going on as, I like many people, only look at stuff thats splashed infront of me. When your viewing anywhere between 5-50 sites at a time, if its not front and center, its not getting read.

    The only group that I would say combats this - and takes time to do so - is the ones that send out personal emails. It's a mass message, but hey, I'm always up to date, and it does appear in my inbox.

    I to am a big big fan of Facebook, but as many social networking sites dictate, it may be free to open, but takes a great amount of time to get it to really work for ya.

    Josh
  • David
    An interesting perspective for “point #4.”: Our audience doesn't want us there.
    Third Thursday in Ottawa (on Monday). Was chaired by, not for profit organizations. One of the speakers was a union rep. And he agreed that his users were almost all on Facebook, but they were not considering entering that space, because “chllin with your union” is the last thing you want to do on facebook.

    I dont necessarily agree, Facebook doesn't have to be exclusively a “place to hang out”. In fact you could probably file this under “doesn't get it” Especially when you know your audience is there... but it was an interesting point of view
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