Don't assume EVERYBODY is on Facebook

Occasionally I see businesses who deliver a newsfeed of sorts on their Facebook page. Keep in mind that this only works fine for those who actually are on Facebook, you can not take for granted that absoluteley everybody is like you, even if your whole world rotates around FB.

I have seen people who never click on FB links, just because these are FB links.
(Yes I am one of them, but I know for sure I am not alone)

The old rule applies: Think about your audience.  Also do not in a Twitter feed just point to your FB page, for the same reason (it is anyway already wrong to automate your Tweets)

Similar advice applies to all other social media, but with FB being the biggest this one jumps to mind first. 

Often we make rules for social media where no rules actually exist.

Profound statement? 

i read an article, it's interesting and I want to comment "Please login to your facebook account to comment" err .. why? I'm not on FB.

Well said. 

I personally find the copying of the same link onto FB, twitter and linkedIn very tiresome.

Im all about enagement and the building of realtionships, I dont want to read the same info on three different platforms

Today everyone is trying to do everything online. And FB is a big part of audience businesses tend to go for. But what they do they tend to forget about is rest of the world. What about people that use web just to check emails and for reading few articles not even have FB Twitter or Google+.

Why businesses are ignoring them? Or they are just such a small number they don’t care?

According to the stats there are more people on Facebook than actually live on this planet...and that's a fact.

yes but  if you have all 3 of them you will get to see them 3 times.... I like building relationship to but I think what happens is they don’t know how to apply to every platform differently. And that one link could work on FB but it might not work on others.

Very true but what they dont realise is they are turning potential relationships/businesspartnerships to dust because people (like me) find them so annoying and therefore dont bother to read the info or engage.

There's actually abit of a backlash going on against Facebook especially in the US currently.
I've toyed with deleting my account but for now it stays.

If we're talking about getting a marketing message out to potential/existing customers, then surely your main consideration is what gets you the most bang for your buck.

If you reckon 90% of your target market use Facebook, then I see no issue in using it as your main/only tool and forgetting the other 10%.

Grab the low hanging fruit and all that.

All very nice, but how do you know that? Seriously.

In your case, accountancy, are 90% of companies who seek voluntary liquidation on FB?
Or 90% of SMEs with general accouncy needs??

Or in Gareth's case 90% of those who need a logo?

etc etc etc

I totally agree this and instantly hide all comments (or delete) from anyone who auto-feeds to LinkedIn or Facebook.

One of whom is paying good money for the 'service'.

I don't Michael, you're right.

But...IMHO marketing is all about making assumptions as you're never going to know all the facts.  I wasn't specifically talking about my business (I briefly dabbled with Facebook PPC a couple of years ago and didn't get very far).

For my accounting business, I now pretty much only work with clients who use FreeAgent.  Their user base from what I can see is heavily tilted towards 20-40 year olds who are savvy in the IT world.  A lot of them use twitter.  Many don't know their landline number (as they only have it to get a broadband connection), they nearly all have smart phones and also move house quite a lot.  Probably many of them are on Facebook, but also know how to keep their privacy levels high and perhaps using apps like Tweetdeck/similar rather than the Facebook website manage to avoid seeing the ads anyway.

So yes, lots of assumptions which I can use to skew my marketing.  Some of the assumptions will lead me to miss a percentage of the market.

I don't claim to be a marketing guru, but like I said in my first post, I think most businesses should spend their marketing time/budget on what they think will get the most impact.  That could be cold calling, direct mail, email marketing, Google Adwords, TV ads, billboard signs, newspaper ads etc etc.  Any one of these will miss some of their potential market, so they need to pick the one or two which they think will reach the most people cost effectively.

If they don't have a clue, they can test each one with some way of measuring response, then drop the ones which are getting minimal return.

That's not a fact.

Yes, everybody is definitely not on Facebook but a significant number of people are there. That makes it a good platform for marketing.