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Social Suicide? Deciding whether or not to tell Facebook to Take A Hike

Oct 17, 2011
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Dan
A colleague sent this article my way. I wanted to share it with all of you and get your take on it.
What Happens When You Break Up With Facebook: Nothing | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

It's funny I have been considering dismantling all of our individual FB accounts in favor a single group account (which we already have and has the largest accumulation of fans)... I'm trying to come up with a downside to moving forward with this idea but I'm not finding one. What do you guys and girls think?
 
Daniel, are all your dealerships in the same geographic area? The first thing off the top of my head is that targeting will be higher if you dilute your page with multiple brands i.e. Toyota, Chevy, etc... . The fuzzier the targeting of a page/post the greater the chance of people not being interested and thus not engage. That would make an already anemic organic reach even worse.

I'm not quite willing to give up on Facebook but have embraced the sad reality that if you do want to get your message out there, you'll have to pay for ads. And Google+ is no where near a contender for FB no matter what usage numbers they quote.
 
I'm not sure why a dealership would want to leave Facebook if they are having success? One of our small stores did 1,897 new local fans for a very small advertising investment. We also had 2,412 interactions with our content creating 109,000+ impressions. Facebook is just a part of the social strategy that includes Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest but we're really happy with the results. The most important take away is to not spend ALL your time here. Focus a large portion of your time on Twitter, Instagram/Facebook about the same, and just post on Google+ and Pinterest.

The Facebook Fraud videos aren't 100% correct. If you click on all of your new fan's personal pages and find out where they come from, what pages they like, and what kind of content they post, you will have a good idea if those people are legitimate or not. All of our new fans are local and don't like 1000s of pages.
 
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I believe that "boost posting" was something that we all knew was coming sooner or later (even if we did not admit it publicly). Facebook, like any other business, operates for a profit. We cannot stop this or change it. It is their bat, ball, stadium and now, they control the fans too by not showing them every message we post.


What we need to do is "play the game". We all know the rules and the way it works.


The way major league franchises have to assemble a great team that wins games by paying high salaries, we need to assemble, create and post great content. Great, engaging content, along with boost posts, will get likes, comments and page likes. The same a way a team with good players that play great together will win.


In a way, we did this to ourselves. Does anybody really think the photo of the "new customer" is relative to anyone who does not personally know the new customer in the photo? Really?? There is plenty of BAD auto dealer content out there on facebook already. In a way, maybe Facebook is doing us a favor by not putting up the crummy posts and we who pay the price and put up great content will reap the rewards.

Dont get me wrong here- I know were being ripped off. I know its modern day extortion. I just know that the only way to fight it and win is to get off facebook. But, I dont want to do that right now.