Mashable posted a new installment yesterday in its Facebook marketing series, summarizing several tips from Peter Shankman, whom the writer of the post describes as “an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with a hearty background of marketing and consulting under his belt.”
Based on my professional experience with Facebook, I don’t agree with all of Shankman’s advice. For instance, he discourages the syndication of content from other social media platforms (like a blog) on to a brand’s Facebook timeline. Yes, it’s smart to post unique content to Facebook, content that can’t be found elsewhere. But a number of organizations have used a mix of syndicated and unique content at Facebook with some success, including a company with which I consult. That company feeds its blog posts to its Facebook timeline, recognizing that a significant number of its Facebook fans don’t consistently read the blog and vice versa. So for those audiences, the content is often unique.
Furthermore, syndication is sometimes necessary, especially for organizations that lack the resources to consider and develop entirely unique content for two or more social media platforms. It’s often better for those companies to have a constant stream of fresh content (or what I like to call “conversation starters”) on all their platforms, even if some of that content is the same.
Where I agree wholeheartedly with Shankman is his counsel to listen to the audience. He notes that “the easiest way to find out what does work on your company’s [Facebook] Brand Page is to ask the fans that frequent it.” Knowing the audience is PR 101. It’s also consistent with the POST (people, objectives, strategy, technology) method advocated by Li and Bernoff (2011, pp. 67-68) in their seminal review of social media best practices.
Reference
Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2011). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies; expanded and revised edition. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
