Best Living - Community Manager's blog

[#1]

“What’s on your mind?” It is a simple question that Facebook poses to its 500 million registered members every day.  And half of them respond.  That is a remarkable number for engagement. 

Facebook’s infrastructure is great at achieving the site’s objectives of connecting friends and facilitating their sharing of updates, pictures and video.  However, companies are increasingly turning to Facebook as an advertising and marketing tool.  Best Buy has several Facebook pages, many of which are either moderated or monitored by the Community Connector team which also moderates the Best Buy Community. 

Facebook’s new feeds provide marketers with the ability to publish messages through status updates.  Admins of Facebook pages can review and analyze data about the number of comments, ‘likes’, and activity their page receives.  Many brands post status updates throughout the week that are commented on by their fan base. 

Best Buy empowers all of its employees to utilize social media to serve our customers.  Many Best Buy stores have their own Facebook page for their locations; some even have Facebook pages for individual departments within their store.  Many of the product categories, such as Movies and Music, have their own Facebook pages as well.

At both the national brand page level and the local store page level, I am both excited and perplexed by the phenomena of brands on Facebook.  For me, it raises a multitude of questions.  Here are two of them:

Does Facebook facilitate an authentic and meaningful communication from brands to customers or does it only create an illusion of numerous impressions? 

Does having so many Facebook pages for a brand facilitate customers connecting with their local stores or dilute a brand?