Contact us

So we’ve been discussing Facebook a lot recently here at Socialsquare, hosting two meetings about how to use Facebook within organisations, and how to help organisations understand and relate to Facebook.

It’s been some interesting discussions, and we’d like to thank everybody who took the time to participate and share their thoughts with us. I thought I’d sum up some of the insights that were shared:

Facebook is a tool for individuals to keep in touch with their friends and family. Organisations have to understand and respect this.

Organisations should have a presence on Facebook. But not on the same terms as individuals. Organisations only make sense on Facebook as social objects, which Facebook’s (real, human, individual) users can relate to, share, and use to show their identity online.

It is difficult for organisations to figure out how to present themselves on Facebook (As a profile? As a group? As a page?) as each kind of interaction defines a different kind of relation (friend, member, fan).

A recent update of Facebook has made this simpler (now pages work much like profiles with walls and status updates), allowing organisations and public figures a clearer role on Facebook.

Facebook is bad at the typical one-way communication that organisations are used to. Communication on Facebook is conversation – and often around and about the organisation rather than with it.

Group membership is mostly used as statements of intent, interest, or political observation. Only individuals are allowed to create groups – not organisations.

The issues of public and private is very central in how individuals within organisations can use Facebook. Using employees Facebook profiles in organisations is inherently tricky, as it will create visible overlaps between work life and private life.

Facebook now allows for making part of your profile public – organisations where employees public and private lives overlap can use this to share work-related information. But most of the people at our discussions didn’t think that this would be widely used.

Too many organisations are getting on the Facebook bandwagon without considering why they are there (one participant likened the situation to the old IBM commercial where two managers are reading a newspaper. One of them says: “We need to get on the Internet.” The other considers this, and says, “Why?” The first manager scans the rest of the article and looks up: “It doesn’t say.”).

Often, Facebook isn’t the right tool for what an organisation wants to achieve.

Facebook is good for permission marketing, creating awareness, and word-of-mouth. But measuring the value of one’s success on Facebook is difficult.

If you’re curious for more, Trine-Maria blogged some insights from the first meeting on her blog, and Andreas J also took some good notes at our latest meeting, which he tweeted afterwards.