Facebook Groups - the pitfalls

Facebook and customer satisfaction

To continue on the theme my blog of last week, I wanted to look at some other aspects of customer service and treatment of members on Facebook and other social networks. As I mentioned before, I think that “social” networks forget that a member is in fact the same as a customer – even though they may have millions of them and even though they may give away their service at no cost. There is no excuse treating members as anything less then a valued customer.

So let’s look at the whole deal around your data and your network that you build on any of the Social Networks. On Facebook, you can build a network of people, or even open a group. One thing you have to understand though is those connections are not treated as then being your relations but somehow Facebook continues to hold the right to kick you off their platform whenever they THINK you may be doing something they don’t like. And not only that, but you then lose all of the friends that you have carefully built up on the platform without any warning. This is therefore not a safe place to rely on in terms of developing real customer relationships – you could lose all the details of those contacts at any time and there is no way of getting them back.

A few weeks ago we gave a presentation on Social Media at CASS, the London Business School to 65 Business Schools. Our focus was in fact a strong recommendation to NOT rely on groups and networks you build on those sites (be it Facebook, or LinkedIn or others) but to build your own social community if you are serious about building a community online for the long-term. Then you can use your groups on other platforms to drive traffic to your community. We have now built several white-label communities based on the E.Factor platform and know that in very little time a company can thus establish their own community and online presence, with all the bells and whistles you could possibly wish for and full control of your own member database and ability to provide all the content you might want to share with that specific group of your members. This increases customer loyalty and allows you to do much more with your group then anything you could do whilst relying on Facebook or LinkedIn or others in that space.
If you want to be serious about your community, talk to people that can build and host a full community for you of which you control all the data and content. And not only for the loyalty and control it will give you , but it will even give you new ways to add revenue streams. Take for instance a nightclub owner for whom we created an online community – it was up and running in 6 weeks of dedicated effort on both parts. They now have a place which they can advertise, to which they can add sponsors, promote events and sell tickets as well as build a loyal following and present them with dedicated content and information.

So when you are on Facebook, building out your group, or on LinkedIn doing the same – bear in mind that that data is not securely in your hands, it remains under the somewhat whimsical control of the networks behind it. It’s up to you to decide – but think about it consciously rather then merely be a sheep in the pack that follows every trend out there. Make a conscious decision what you actually want to achieve and then work on executing your strategy.
 
Marion@efactor.com

0 Comments

---

Topics

• Business
• Events
• Fashion
• Funding
• Gadgets
• Luxury Goods
• Management
• Networking
• Sales
• Sport
• Technology
• Travel

Contributing

• 
  UCV Host

• 
  Joe Marchese

• 
  Anil Bhat