Need to learn Facebook? Be a participant

Somewhere between a cautionary discussion on search engine marketing scams and an explanation of Google's Adwords system I decided to give my e-business class a 10 minute break. Before I could so much as duck away I was quickly shepherded over to one of my student's workstations. She was a small business owner who had, with the (likely unwilling) help of her teenage son, created a Facebook fan page for her business. Or so she thought. She was not actually sure what she had created, merely that it existed and was now the cause of much anxiety. Such situations are far from rare in these fledgling days of the social media revolution. Many business people are taking the plunge without quite knowing what to do when they get there.

My student (and her son) had done the right things so far. They had indeed created a "fan page" for her small boutique storefront on Facebook. They did not fall into the trap of mistakingly using a personal profile to promote the business. So far, so good. However once the page existed that big blank canvas just stared back at them, her logo nestled in the corner of that intimidating lifeless void. She needed content.

The business owner therefore turned to the one source of content she had experience with, her monthly newsletter. Dutifully on the first of every month she had taken these mailings, all eight paragraphs worth, and pasted them into Facebook. Each month they were ignored by the very people she hoped to engage. I told her that the problem was not so much the content, as the newsletters contained all sorts of interesting information, but in how she was sharing them. My student was the classic reluctant Facebook business user. She took no particular pleasure in using the social network personally and therefore had no sense of the appropriate length of a piece of shared content. She had no concept of how frequently she should be posting nor did she realize how quickly information is passed over when lost in a sea of 1000 status updates and friend photos.

What did she need to do? She needed to start acting like an anthropologist. The study of other cultures often involves a tactic called "participant observation," in which you learn the norms of a people by immersing yourself into their society. In the same way that an anthropologist can learn the customs of a tribe by living among them, so too the business owner must learn the rhythm of Facebook communication by actually doing it. Soon it would become apparent to her that her newsletter should be cut up into a series of two to three sentence tips. That information should be shared over time among genuine conversation, interesting links, photos and more. There is no more effective way for a novice to learn the subtleties of an online community than to get their hands dirty and become one of them.

...from a series of Social Media articles I've been contributing to the Business Link newspaper, with editions in Niagara, Hamilton-Halton and Brantford.