Facebook Fail: Posting as a Business on a Personal Page

I'm a firm believer that the biggest benefit of social media is the ability for businesses to humanize their brand. Successful brands do a great job of using social media to connect with their target market in a very personal way. My advice for humanizing a brand is: connect, engage and build relationships.

Recently, Facebook started allowing users who have a business page (fan page) to start using Facebook under their business name. This is a recipe for disaster in so many ways.

Since Facebook made this change, I've noticed a lot of business owners abusing this new feature. For example, I noticed a local business owner who has started "participating" in discussions on people's personal pages and posting random one-liner comments (under her business name) that are completely void of any real substance (like "Wow" or "Good idea" or "Really?") just to get her business name to appear all over someone's personal page. If this business owner doesn't think her Facebook friends will notice, she's sadly mistaken. Pretty soon, this business owner will notice that her friends are un-friending her in droves - and she'll have no one but herself to blame. Page owners who pimp "engagement" as some kind of lame, one-line comment are too lazy to work hard at truly engaging their fans and building a relationship.

This kind of Facebook "marketing" lacks any real personalization and it comes dangerously close to SPAM. Think of it this way: Would you visit a neighbor's house and throw a sign for your business in your neighbor's yard? I certainly hope you wouldn't. That's what this business owner is doing - and pretty soon other "marketers" will start doing the same thing. Imagine opening up your personal page one day and half your "friends" have posted one marketing message after another on your page. It'll remind you of MySpace all over again.

How do I feel about business page owners posting on other business pages under their business name? Unless the page is setup specifically to allow business owners to market their product or service, I think it's a bad idea and it's really unprofessional. I wouldn't visit Wal-Mart, Target or any other business and throw my marketing messages up all over their store. It's their store - not mine.

Most of the reasons I dislike this new "Post as a Page" feature on Facebook are personal. But, if I feel that way, how do you think other Facebook users are feeling? One of the reasons people left MySpace in favor of Facebook is because MySpace users grew tired of seeing marketing junk all over their personal pages.

I'm very picky about posting marketing messages on my personal page. I don't want to annoy my friends. I certainly won't allow others to annoy my friends with their marketing messages - no matter how subtle it is. In my opinion, any time someone posts a message on my personal page under their business name, that's a subtle marketing message. On my page, those messages are quickly deleted.

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cross-posted here: Facebook Fail: Posting as a Business on a Personal Page