Just in the last couple of days there’s been reports in the news about Facebook having lost lots and lots of customers recently, lots and lots of members that is, somewhere in the order of 1.6 million in the last quarter. This may or may not be accurate, certainly there is some fuzzy math going on there—those who calculate this are using an internal tool that the advertisers have access to for projecting media reach across the globe for Facebook and they’re extrapolating some numbers from that to try to estimate the North American membership. They’re probably not accurate, but there are some other things going on in social media that’s worth mentioning at this point. So let’s talk about three things; Facebook in general, a tool for marketing on Facebook called NorthSocial, as well as an up-and-coming blogging tool that allows you to broadcast from a blog to the rest of the social media called Posterous. First of all Facebook.
You’re not going to set up a company website or web profile on Facebook and get bulldozed with customers—not going to happen. If you’re in a business that needs to stay in touch with your prior customers and potential customers and remind them to stay in touch with you, Facebook might be a good tool for that. Certainly you don’t want to expect to get much more than that out of it. You can do things like contests and group coupon kinds of things through Facebook, but not directly. That’s a violation of Facebook’s terms of service and they are cracking down on that. So when you hear the local TV. station or something say “enter a sweepstakes by liking us on Facebook”, that’s not allowed. There are tools to help you do that and, as I said, NorthSocial is one of those. They have a number of tools, they’re kind of a Swiss army knife of Facebook marketing. They allow you to do contests and group coupons and mailing lists and reminders and volunteer forms and other kinds of tools through Facebook that help you keep in touch with your clients. It’s a pretty good tool, it’s not expensive to get started—I think they’re somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 a month for a starter account, well worth looking into. The next thing is a blogging tool called Posterous. That is one where you can set up your posts there, you can even use them to run your website although it’s not really designed for that; it’s really designed as a blog. You can email things into them, they will format them for you and post them to your blog, and then you can use the tools that are already built into Posterous to send all that information you uploaded to your blog, out to your social networking sites. So whether you use twitter or Facebook or any one of probably two dozen other tools to reach your social networking goals you can do that all through Posterous if you’re so inclined. All those are very new tools, they’ve been around for a little while but they’re just now getting enough traction to be noticed, and getting all the bugs out. So, I definitely recommend these three: Facebook, which you’ve obviously heard of; Posterous, which you probably haven’t heard of; and NorthSocial, which is a great one-trick pony for marketing on Facebook.
