How to Design a Page on Facebook – Present The Plan

How To Design A Page On Facebook

Friday: Present the Plan

You’ve spent most of the last two weeks gathering information, negotiating with stakeholders, and preparing a plan to help your company take better advantage of Facebook and social media. Now it’s time to sell it. We’ve talked at length about the value of metrics and the importance of communication to get cooperation from your colleagues. Here are a few other potential potholes that you should consider as you summarize
your thoughts:

Management/mitigation of unintended consequences

Good executives at major corporations are trained to mitigate risk wherever possible. You’ll need to show that you’ve thought through all the potential negative situations that may arise from your effort and that you have a plan for dealing with problems and unintended negative consequences.

Organizational fit

Are you the right person in the company to run the project? Would this cause a political problem in your company that will create problems for the management team? Have you reached across organizational lines proactively to make the project run as smoothly as possible? Will the project be at odds with other major initiatives inside the company? You don’t want to compete with your colleagues unless there are good reasons to do so.

Fit with corporate culture/norms

Are the things you are proposing a fit for the way the company communicates with customers, partners, and so on? If so, is that a good thing? Management may have a different perspective on this than the rank and file. Be sure to understand how superiors see the opportunity in advance of your presentation.

Future commitment

Will this project cause the company to take on a future financial or head count liability that it currently does not have? Do you have a handle on the costs associated with the effort and how that may change over time? Could backing out of such a commitment cause customers significant consternation and create negative perceptions about the company or brand?

If they are balanced and fair, your superiors will likely ask you for a good balance of metrics that you can control and stretch goals that will make you really work. That’s OK . Remember, you are trying to learn what will work and what has worked on Facebook. ROI is certainly the toughest metric to guarantee today “Organizational Considerations,” when we talk about what managers and executives should demand of employees who run social media projects. How To Design A Page On Facebook

Week 3: Establish a Presence with the Facebook Profile and Friends

Congratulations! Now that you have a plan and you’ve taken feedback from the firing line of your management team, it’s time to execute! You’re probably already very familiar with the basics of Facebook, but you may never have looked at all the opportunities from a business perspective. We did a quick walk-through of the basics
of the Facebook profile and friending, “What Is Facebook?”—now we’ll talk about these features with an eye toward marketing opportunities. We’ll avoid feature walk-throughs as much as possible here, to focus on how different elements of Facebook help you create a campaign that your customers will appreciate.

Monday/Tuesday: Learn About Data in the Facebook Profile and Security Settings

As we’ve discussed previously, everything about your identity is summarized in the Facebook profile. There, you have the ability to say as much or as little as you want about yourself. Table 4.3 summarizes the personal information users may expose about themselves. It is a ridiculously rich set of data, most of which is accessible to marketers for better targeting through Facebook advertising, “Month 3: Creating a Following with Facebook Ads.”

The downside to collecting all this information is that it may make a user nervous. Think about it—if the Facebook profile is totally filled out, it contains quite a bit of personal information that is often used in sensitive situations such as when you’ve forgotten your password for a credit card or when old friends you haven’t seen in years want to reconnect. It’s perfect for criminals who may want to steal someone’s identity or use profile data to impersonate that person or act maliciously on behalf of that person.

Facebook established a rich set of data privacy controls with privacy settings for limiting exposure of certain types of information to certain people on Facebook—friends, friends of friends, people in certain networks, nobody at all, and so on. All of this was done to make users more comfortable when adding life’s personal details into the social network. Users can also customize the privacy they want on a user-by-user basis if they are particularly concerned about certain individuals. Facebook truly has done a remarkable job of simplifying a
user’s management of their own personal data.

All of it means a few things for marketers:

• You simply won’t be able to access some people who are more careful with the data they share on Facebook.
• However, most Facebook users, by virtue of adding self-identifying data to their profiles, are by default exposing themselves to marketing offers.
• Facebook has an unbelievably rich set of demographic and behavioral data on its users, and that data will likely play a major role in the future of Facebook advertising and marketing on the platform.

In the sense that Facebook can gather accurate and up-to-date demographic targeting data from users, Facebook has only a few rivals (Google, Yahoo, Twitter, maybe Microsoft, and a few others). To learn more, you can check out How To Design A Page On Facebook.