Facebook Spam. If you’re going to do it, do it right!
I handle a number of client accounts and yesterday I logged in as my client and in the admin panel was “Facebook Services Company posted on your timeline.” Of course that is not the real name of the company. I read the post and just shook my head.
It started out as a compliment, “You have 3,322 Likes and that’s pretty good!” but then went on to say that for only the low, low price of $129.00 per month they could pick up 100 Likes a month for however long they signed up for. It followed with “if you call right now” and a bunch of “we work with Fortune 500 companies…” kind of blather, and I felt sorry for them.
What a terrible way to advertise on Facebook. Facebook is social. It is best done in an organic, affirmative manner. It is not the place to sound like a desperate late-night infomercial selling a plastic kitchen product. Worse, when you behave like that you stand out like a toad in a basket of kittens.
Had I been the owner of the company I would have done exactly what I did: deleted the post. It would have been better to Like the page, post a few appropriate posts and create a relationship. Maybe even made a contact 1 to 1 on LinkedIn with the company owner or just invited them to Like that company page which no doubt has a million Likes. There are a lot of ways the approach could have been made but what is important here is that it has to be made in a manner that works for the time and place.
Magazine ads are always designed to appeal to the readers of the magazine, late night infomercials are always high energy because they figure you are sleepy and they want you to act NOW, and Facebook is the place to softpedal the advertising and work on building a relationship. Otherwise the other kittens will kick you out of the basket and delete your post!