sidepost: more on Retailer presence on Facebook
About an article I read regarding how Retailers should approach making and maintaining their online social presence: 8 Best Practices for Retailers on Facebook Pages on insidefacebook.com
Overall, I agree with their points. Traditional methods such as television commercials and magazine/newspaper advertisements often cost an inordinate amount. Facebook, on the other hand, is bound to cost much less than, for example, a tv commercial. And how do smaller retailers compare to larger retailers on the Facebook platform?
Many large retailers have already been successful in gaining more than a million fans to their pages. But how many of those fans actually participate (whether passively or actively) in that community of consumers? After all, you can adjust your news feed to ignore posts by certain people or pages. Without the news feed appearance, pages fall into the background very easily. But despite this, I still think it is important for retailers to make an online presence on social platforms anyways. Friends may like or post something about the retailer and can link that to the retailer’s official page. And even without contests and promotions, Facebook is very widely used. Given that, retailers should make their presence known on this online community too. It might even be a need and not simply an opportunity for most retailers anymore.
From an article posted in December 2010 - "JCPenny's Becomes First Retailer to Open Complete Store on Facebook"
As the article mentions in its eight points:
The Facebook user interface itself is fairly simple, usually requiring only a little bit of thought on the user’s part to understand. An example of failure on this point was made in my previous post about Walmart’s attempt 4 years ago. But they’ve clearly revised their approach since then. The Walmart page on Facebook now boasts of 2.99 million users.
An additional point to add, though, is to ensure security even beyond what Facebook offers. There are several retailers’ pages which incorporate online shopping. However, for customers to actually utilize that function, they must have confidence that their information and privacy will be protected. Facebook has addressed the issue of security recently (a given since Zuckerberg’s fan page was hacked) – certainly not a good sign for retailers’ pages. They recently posted a message title “A Continued Commitment to Security” just yesterday on The Facebook blog. It can be found here.