Facebook Is Not The Answer For Everything

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Roderick Low is a social media coach and trainer at Expeditus Media. He helps small and medium businesses make sense of the social web and equip them with the skills, tools and strategies necessary to reach out and connect to their target audience.

Facebook has become the number one social networking platform that small and medium businesses use to reach out to their target audience. Local businesses are jumping in by creating Facebook pages to attract and keep fans.

That’s not a surprise considering that Facebook has grown to about 350 million people worldwide in just five years. In Singapore, it’s estimated that 1.8 million people age 13 to 65 have joined Facebook. However, recent study has found that Facebook might not be the right approach for most businesses after all.

Research from Sysomos found that most Facebook Fan Pages are not really that popular among Facebook audience.

The research found that out of 600,000 local corporate fan pages on Facebook, about one third (35%) have less than 100 fans. Over three quarters (77%) have less than 1,000 fans. Only 4% of fan pages have more than 10,000 fans.

Meanwhile, celebrities make up 7% of all fan pages but take up the bulk of fans in the network. Here is the breakdown of the statistics:

• 95% of pages have more than 10 fans

• 65% of pages have more than 100 fans

• 23% of pages have more than 1,000 fans

• 4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans

• 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans

• 0.047% of pages have more than one million fans (297 in total)

According to Sysomos, pages with a million fans have three times the owner-generated content compared to the average Facebook page. With that many fans, the pages also bring in 60 times fan-generated content compared to an average Facebook page.

The research gave a startling overview of how businesses are using social media. Facebook should not be seen as the holy grail of social media dominance. You might hear some people tell you that “size does not matter” but I believe the very reason why businesses goes in to set up a fan page is to increase the awareness of their brand and grow their fan base.

So How to Make a Fan Page Successful?

Businesses should not jump in to Facebook just because their competitors are doing it. They should not do it just because it’s the hype and it’s the ‘in thing’ right now. In order to create a successful Fan Page, businesses should start by asking themselves, ‘what they really want to achieve on Facebook’. That very question will give them an idea of how they can go about achieving it with the assistance of a Fan page.

There are many examples of successful Facebook Page. However, there are more fail attempts because businesses don’t have a clear strategy of how to build a successful Facebook Page.

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