Like many (most?) of us these days, I have a Facebook profile, and I’m also connected to several pages. Some are to do with the charity I work for, but I also have a page for Awendan. However, they are at polar opposites: the charity page has upwards of 2,000 likes; daily content and stories posted; and we once got more than 200 shares on a single post. In contrast, Awendan has single-figure likes and I admit that I rarely post stories – sometimes a shared post from another business page or otherwise it’s a feed that pulls through my tweets.
I think the key word there is ‘tweets’. As far as translation related things are concerned, I interact a lot more on Twitter than I ever will on Facebook. The #xl8 tag is always busy and I find Twitter much better suited to business sector interactions. When it comes down to it, I prefer to keep personal and business streams separate and Facebook is hard work in that respect.
Facebook is much better if it’s your personal, individual customers you want to communicate with; the charity page interactions are 95% with individual donors and supporters, rarely our corporate sponsors. Many of the local craft and handmade small business pages that I like are very successful because they’re personal and talking with the people that visit them at fairs or buy their crafts. Even the big corporate juggernaut brand pages are all about B2C interactions – and they have a huge budget to throw at Facebook advertising or campaigns to boot.
For our industry sector, much more long-term value comes from B2B marketing or communications and for freelance businesses of our size Facebook just requires too much work and too much budget for little return in the B2B sector. I’m now considering whether to close my Awendan page altogether and stick to Twitter!
Do you have a Facebook page for your freelance business? Does it work for you?