Mark Harbeke

Here's a quick tip based on real-world experience – mine. If you're on the fence about creating a Facebook page for your business, or keeping one up compared to your time spent promoting your business on other social networking sites, ask yourself two related questions:

How well does my product/service resonate with my target demographic within Facebook (here's a link that shows a breakdown of users by generation, for starters)?
Is even heavily veiled marketing of my product/service via my Facebook page – ie, status updates; new photos or video – going to be perceived as too hard of a sell?

I bring this up because as an Admin for two Facebook pages – the one for Winning Workplaces and a newer one for my wife's recently formed, Los Angeles-based production company, title3 – I've noticed striking differences in such desired metrics as the rate of increase in new fans and the number of interactions, or any time someone comments, likes, or shares a page update or comments on the page's wall.

To see how this tip plays out, consider:

The Winning Workplaces page is about: workplace people practices that create better work environments in small businesses.
The title3 page is about: artistic works that are innovative and provide opportunities for women in the arts.

Here's how many fans each of these pages attracted in their first month. Keep in mind that more work went into the Winning Workplaces page over similar timeframes.

Yes, these pages are in wildly divergent industries and have different target audiences. But it is also true that the title3 page has a more visceral product (staged and filmed works) offered under a mission statement that appeals to more people (a good share of the 5 million women in LA County, at least).

One more thing: Your answers to the questions I posed above have implications for employee engagement training and employee leadership development. It may well be a better use of your and your workers' time in the marketing/sales area to focus less or not at all on reaching Facebook users and converting them to paying customers, and more on reaching them via more traditional channels. Do more of what works best, after all.