Using Facebook for Something Other than Showing Off My Kid

So, do you let your clients follow you on Facebook?  I’ve been loathe to do it.  Frankly, I don’t want them to know about my addiction to online Scrabble or the fact that I’m often up at 1 a.m. commenting on my friends’ posts for the day.  Also, I like to have that little bit of personal space, like when you’re at a Junior High dance and the chaperones shove balloons between you and your dance partner to make sure that your naughty bits don’t touch.  I really, really don’t want anything to do with my client’s naughty bits.

On the other hand, my marketing pro keeps pushing the idea of using a “fan page” to keep in touch with clients and maybe even to cross-promote them to one another.  While I’m pretty sure that my professional psychic client isn’t going to have a whole lot of use for my Christian-based merchant services client, I can see the value in some of the other folks mingling a bit.

On the non-existent third hand, I also like the idea of having easy access to all of my clients at once.  If things get a little slow, maybe I could use my fan page to announce a “special” rate to anyone who comes up with a project to go on my calendar for the next week.  Or, perhaps I can convince them to get their friends and family to join my fan page so our company looks super popular.

Having watched others while putting off the inevitable being cautious this long, I have been able to learn some DOs and DON’Ts that I can employ, so that’s good.  For example, I won’t post the same exact things to my fan page and my personal account.  Unless they’re really super cool, of course.  I also won’t ask people to join my fan page more than once a week.

Oh, and I definitely won’t be linking to this blog from there.  I figure that if clients want to go to the trouble of finding out what I’m doing online, then they can read this blog and hopefully get a chuckle.  There are some, however, who might not totally appreciate some of the not-so-nice things I’ve said here in the past, so I’m letting fate and the Google gods weed them out as much as possible.

The great Facebook Fan Page experiment has begun.  So far my dad’s left a really nice comment, and people with absolutely no interest in what PCI compliance is all about have still given me a thumbs-up when I mentioned I was writing about it.  Of the 48 current fans, I believe that only one actually qualifies as a client, and the rest are supportive friends and family.  Let’s hope that ratio gets skewed in a different direction as time goes by, eh?


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4 responses
  1. Phil Avatar
    Phil

    I’ve written tons on PCI compliance. Let me know if you need any resources.

  2. Lorna Doone Brewer Avatar
    Lorna Doone Brewer

    Thanks, Phil. I’ll keep that in mind!

  3. Jeanne Grunert Avatar

    I’m the author of the book “The Art of Effective Online Social Networking” and a marketing consultant in addition to a freelance writer. I do invite all my connections onto Facebook, and I use my Facebook pages to share links to my writing. I have acquired several clients through social networking sites (Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook). However, be very careful if you mingle business & personal life on Facebook….know who your potential clients are and be willing to self monitor your posts so that they are more friendly, neutral etc. I do NOT recommend “Fan Pages” anymore to my clients. They are so over used right now. How many invitations did you get this week to “fan” someone’s page? I get about 20 a week an there is no way I can keep up…am hearing the same everywhere.

  4. allena Avatar

    I have two full-out (not fan) pages. One for people I know virtually/work, and one solely for close fam, friends, social circle. It’s been like this about 6 months, and it’s been ok.

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