DIY in Social Media will lead to RIP

Facebook is free. Twitter is free. YouTube is free. With all these free tools, many businesses try to go the DIY route when implementing a Social Media strategy. I think this is a huge mistake. Although the Social Media tools are free, knowing how to use them takes intuition, practice, experience, and a broad knowledge of Web 2.0 and Social Media. What’s intrigues me most are the nuances in Social Media. Every platform is different. For example, frequent posts on Twitter are good, they’re not so good on Facebook, and a terrible thing on LinkedIn. I’m over-simplifying (again), but these platforms are all different. We all (including myself) have treated them as equal, and dual and triple posted to them, but that doesn’t work.

As more people try to DIY with Social Media, they’re going to realise that they need to “call in the experts” as it were. Today, Khalil Aleker posted this question to me on Facebook:

The main challenge for many Facebook users who want to create “fan” or business pages is that you have to have a personal profile in order to start a fan page, and the two are linked. As a result, business owners regularly receive “friend” requests from people who actually intended to become a “fan” of their business page. Any advice?

Yes, you do need a personal Facebook profile to create a Fan page, but thereafter the Fan page is independent. Furthermore, you can assign other people as Admins to the Fan Page. Members of the Fan page never need to know who manages the page – and several people can manage at once. This is sometimes essential, especially in a growing organisation.

So if you want to grow your Fan page, you simply market and promote it, and not your personal profile. A few months ago Facebook launched vanity URLs (they were first only allowed on Fan pages, but now they’re allowed on personal profiles as well), so place that vanity URL wherever you can – posters, email signatures, etc. Ours is facebook.com/jayzcoza – pretty neat and simple to remember.

With a Fan page also comes the skill of motivating interaction and participation, monitoring Facebook Insights, etc. To me, a Fan page is a company’s mini website within Facebook. And you have to take full advantage of that. Also, it’s not a personal profile, so personal family photos, etc are a big no-no!

It’s possible to create an event within your personal profile. But if it’s a company event and you have a Fan page, then you should create the event within the Fan page. It’s easy to miss this nuance. This way, the event will stay within the Fan page, even after the event date. It’s an automated archive of all your company events – and that is valuable for your reputation history.

My point of this post is to show that DIY does not work with Social Media. People like myself who are specialists in this area know that it takes a daily effort of analysis and research to get it right in Social Media. And things are ever-changing in the online world, so for the lay person to keep up is difficult, and sometimes even impossible.

Khalil, I hope this answers your question.