Close to a year ago, I started a Facebook Page for my Art of the Business blog. I did this for several reasons:
- My own personal Facebook account, facebook.com/rebeccacoleman is, well, personal. It has lots of photos of my son, and I often talk about stuff that we are doing together. Having a separate page for my business seemed like a good way to separate business and personal.
- I teach this stuff for a living, for pete’s sake! I am always telling people they need to have a Facebook page for their business. I needed to have one, too.
Frankly, my Facebook business page is just not successful. How do you judge the success of something?
- Numbers: how many people do you have following you?
- Quality of interactions: are people responding to your posts? Are they continuing the discussion, “liking” your comments, posting their own links?
Although I have over 100 fans, the quality of the interactions is not high. I get the occasional “like” (thanks, Dave!), but for the most part, it’s just me. Posting links. Other than that, mostly silence.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not slagging the Facebook Page. I have other pages I administrate that are incredibly successful. The Beast of Bottomless Lake page helped us sell out our OIFF screening, for example. That page has over 400 fans, and lots of interactions.
I’ve had a couple of conversations with some other consultant-like folks over the past couple of months, and many of them agreed with me: the FB page is not always the right tool for folks like us.
Here’s what I’m going to do. Facebook has a new list feature, where, like Twitter, I can create a list of my friends and group them. I’m simply going to make a list of folks that I know via business, and don’t want to share photos of my son with. Then, when I post, Facebook gives me the option to exclude those people from my post.
If you have a Facebook page, how’s it going? Is it working for you?